


Jedikiah and the Stern Reprimand

by AshenPhoenix



Category: The Tomorrow People (2013)
Genre: Aftercare, Begging, Blackmail, Boss/Employee Relationship, Breast Worship, Cunnilingus, Do Homo Superiors get HR?, F/M, Founder Badassery, Handsy Jedikiah is handsy, Human? Resources, Ice Play, Jedikiah Price dirty talk, Jedikiah is a mean boss, Liberties with employees, Mind Sex, Multiple Orgasms, Office Sex, Oral Sex, PWP, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Punishment, Romance, SCIENCE!, Sensory Deprivation, Sex Toys, Spanking, Squirting, The three T's take a smutty spin, Topping from the Bottom, Vaginal Sex, Wax Play, hostile working environment, no kissing, office smut, office supplies kink, okay some plot, secretary smut, then there is kissing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-26
Updated: 2017-04-23
Packaged: 2018-01-10 03:22:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 51,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1154174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AshenPhoenix/pseuds/AshenPhoenix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."</p><p>[From the Preface]”<br/>― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters </p><p>Upon the Founder's orders, Jedikiah Price is graced with a personal secretary. She's mercilessly efficient, composed, and definitely more than what meets the eye. Jedikiah enjoys ruffling her feathers, and when her secret breaks... well. With the aid of blackmail, he enjoys ruffling more than her feathers. (AKA, I have a shameless crush on JP and this fandom needs more smut) JPxOC Rated M for a reason!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Jedikiah Price was a diligent man. Tenacious, precocious... an observant and introspective few would even call him passionate (much in the same way Judas Iscariot was passionate). His cool demeanor rarely showed it, though. An indolent slant of his eyes and a thrumming, bassy voice did little to give away the conviction settled in his bones; the pleasure he took in his work. Most would call him cold. Unfeeling. Robotic with a cruel streak and a whippish mind.

In previous times and careers, he'd been accused of being all of these things to a fault. He took them all as compliment.

Now, though, Jedikiah had found his niche, his calling. With a titan's grip on the reins of a powerful organization systematically shutting down a threatening species, diligence and its associates only paid him, and well.

Though he did not know it, over the next few months, he was about to find out just how well.

The building was bustling in the pre-lunch activity: secretaries, researchers, agents, and trainers all doing their jobs to save the Homo Sapiens race. The fact that there were some Homo Superiors interspersed with them was inconsequential. The freaks of nature (Jedikiah loathed to attribute superiority to their species in any way, including their name, unless absolutely necessary) were firmly leashed. Death and decommission loomed over each and every one, maintaining the mutants' rightful place under his thumb.

He'd rather have them under his expensive heel, but they served as a means to an end.

Jedikiah sat at his desk and tapped on a laser-projection keyboard synced to his tablet, summarizing the report of the decommission of an agent's powers due to a stunning mission failure. He was just getting ready to detail the exact amount of time he'd convulsed against the restraints when a soft knock sounded on the open door of his office.

The blonde man looked up. He wasn't expecting anyone. Those who came to his door regularly were invited, or, in the case of his nephew, not. He certainly wasn't expecting this.

A white dress blouse with a temporary clearance badge on the lapel, a knee-length gray pencil skirt, and hair the color of milk chocolate done up with short black sticks greeted him. Shapely calves clad in modest hose led to shiny black high heels. Hardly the typical dress of an agent under his command. Come to think of it, he didn't recognize her.

Eyes the color of sea glass queried gently behind studious glasses. "Mr. Price?"

"Can I help you?" he asked shortly, though with just enough politeness to soften the edge of begrudged interruption.

"I'm Laura," she said, taking a light yet empowered step into the office. "Laura Stern?"

Jedikiah blinked at her, letting the heavy pause convey his apathy. "Still drawing a blank."

She gave the tiniest swallow of discomfort, easily masked by a straightening of her glasses. "I'm on loan from the Raleigh office. I thought my visit was heralded by the Director some months ago."

The blonde man blinked again, this time in mild surprise that he'd forgotten, and concern for the stunning lack of details he was able to wring out of his memory. "Just a moment," he said, buying himself time to look over his minutes from the previous few months' board meetings. Surely, the answers he sought but declined to ask rested there: rapt attention during meetings was something of a personal super power. When the man conducting the meetings was a telepath, it was one hell of a spur.

As he tabbed through the documents composed in his own shorthand, the woman took another step into the office, closing the distance between them to one of a single stride. He did not deign to look up, even as the barest hint of some floral scent wafted over him. Without conscious ascent, he gave a quiet, deeper inhale. Effeminate roses. Exotic jasmine. Authoritative sandalwood. The real smells, not a chemist's handiwork.

As he riffled and scanned, she did not shift on her four inch heels. Her hands did not leave the relaxed clasp on the thin briefcase in front of her. In fact, stillness overtook her so completely that even Jedikiah, who worked with people trained in sniper warfare, was mildly impressed. He fought the urge to look up and see if she was still breathing.

It was the power of her gaze that made him purposefully slow down in retribution. Though he knew she wasn't staring at him, the weight of it pressed on the very air of the room. He was not a man to be rushed, and the regression of the thickened air signaled he won the tacit battle by attrition.

"Laura Stern," he said finally, a note of downplayed triumph in his tone. Further reading made his brow knit in bemusement. "The Director indicates here that, due to increased traffic in current mutant communities and a sharp rise in breakouts, I am to - " His knitted brow was liberated to his hairline. " - take on a personal secretary?" The ascension of his voice in disbelief broke her statuary impression.

Reaching into her briefcase and pulling out a tablet of her own, she swiped around as she said, "Yes, I have my resume, commendations, and accolades here for your perusal." She closed that final step, completing the conquering, and with a deft flick sent the documents careening through cyberspace to pop up on his own tablet, covering the unfinished report. With a rustle, a paper on the official letterhead of Employee Resources was slid across the desk, verifying she'd passed screening.

Jedikiah regarded her with thinly masked wariness. He didn't like having things sprung on him, but he could hardly fault the woman whose slim wrists belied steady and proficient fingers. He did as bade, though, and perused.

Slowly, his brows lowered and his eyes widened imperceptibly. Resume? He'd seen less thorough IRS audits. Commendations? The names listed went in ascending order, from the Director himself all the way down to the individual regional supervisors'. This woman had been all over the country, serving as the spine of several protocol books, the mastermind of more than one database overhaul, and the merciless cutthroat of inadequacy.

The accolades were imbedded audio files, a common veracity measure in Ultra. They took up over half the file space.

The most delicate throat-clearing Jedikiah had ever heard caused him to look up. "I understand if this is somewhat unexpected," began the woman, no hint of judgment or condescension in her voice. "Though I come recommended, the final approval for my position is up to you. If you would like to have more time to consider, I can come back tomorrow."

There was a thread of strength in her tone that suggested she did not extend this courtesy to many. It was implied by the slight tip of her mouth that doing so would paint him a fool in her eyes. She knew exactly what she was, who she was, and what she wanted to do.

Jedikiah made a show of sitting back in his Herman Miller Embody chair. Tenacity of decision making was called for. "That is unnecessary," he replied. "You can start today." Rising to his full and considerable height, he extended his hand to the woman with a judicious smile and a rigid spine. "Welcome to Ultra, Miss Stern."

As he'd desired, she had to bend slightly over the wide desk to accept the hand and pump it with adequate authority. "Just Stern, please, Mr. Price." There was a dancing in her jasper eyes that hid a private joke.

"Stern, then."

 

Stern decided upon the leather sofa as her perch with a certain contrived dignity. She'd clearly been expecting a desk of her own. Jedikiah jotted a quick memo to himself (because, clearly, his mind was failing him early) to requisition one from storage and have it assembled.

It was commonplace to have secretaries' work stations near those of their charges. He was going to have to consider where he'd prefer her to be. Just outside his office was a hallway that wouldn't work, at the end of which was a bullpen of other employee's desks. Somehow, he couldn't see her enjoying it there. But what did he care?

Stern was his personal secretary. That implied a fever pitch of intimacy that, frankly, rankled him. He wished he'd had more time to prepare himself for this neat little takeover.

But... Director's orders. He'd handle it like any other.

Jedikiah handed the report off to Stern to finish, almost tossed it with the level of affected casualness. "You've handled decommission reports before, correct?"

As she withdrew and arranged some office necessities from her briefcase and lay them on the low table before the couch, Stern had the good sense to fix her withering gaze on the carpet, just for a second, before replying, "Yes, I have."

He quirked an unseen smile at her bristle. "Our office does one thing different in compiling the different accounts. We add the medical profile of the actual decommission process. Heartrate, blood sugar before and after, and such. It keeps insurance low."

She'd pulled out a larger, working tablet, crossing her legs primly to balance the device across them. "Consider it done."

The degree to which he liked that attitude made him momentarily pause.

Settling back into his desk, he tried to ignore the invasion of another body in what had thirty minutes previously been his sanctum sanctorum. He started on reconciling the field combat reports with each other, poking holes with abandon for a solid two hours without coming up for air. Against the left wall, fingertips on a plasma screen were so soft and rapid as to be barely noticed, but he did, anyway. He refused to call it soothing: he was still begrudging the whole affair, and damn well would for some indeterminate time.

Again, that unobtrusive throat clearing caught his attention. He finished typing his sentence before answering, "Yes?"

Stern looked positively comfortable, inordinately so for someone in a new environment, sharing space with a new boss. It was almost disconcerting. "I cannot upload the report without a Level 7 security clearance," she said, sounding somewhat sheepish.

Jedikiah could have facepalmed for his shortcomings. Twice in one day, he'd forgotten something critical. "I'll have one printed up by the end of the day," he assured. "Send the report over here, I'll look it over." It was both a test and a goad. Already, prodding at her pride with a stick was becoming an enjoyable hobby.

Despite the short duration of the hesitation, she managed to pack a bundle of tacit insult into it. "Sure thing." A flick later, and it was open on his screen.

Any other man would have jaw-dropped. Any other man would have examined it for iambic pentameter and fell weeping to his knees. As far as reports went, it was perfection. Jedikiah allowed himself a nod, then sent the document on its way to file keeping.

His watch gave a single beep, denoting the hour. In a matter of seconds, the noise outside the office increased, and soon the hallway was fraught with people trailing down to the lunchroom. Jedikiah stood automatically. "I'll show you the cafeteria."

Stern's eyes gave a smile that didn't reach her mouth. It seemed characteristic. "I think all I'll have to do is follow the herd."

Jedikiah actually did smile at that.

"If it's all the same to you, sir," she said, peeking up at him as he rounded the desk. "I would like to stay back a familiarize myself with the command tree of your system."

He found it both nettling and strangely satisfying that her first 'sir' to him was not in recognition of his authority. Nettling in that it wasn't in response to a command. Satisfying in that was in request to enable better performance.

"What you do on your lunch hour is your business," he replied. He halted in front of the low table, reached up to his lapel, and unclipped his clearance. "Here." He tossed the Level 7 card onto the table. "Don't lose it."

Turning the corner out of the office allowed him a brief glimpse of her surprised face. It filled him with a sense of pride usually assigned to putting a bullet in someone's eye.

He should have realized then that rattling Laura Stern's cage would prove to be an enjoyably, inexorably slippery slope.


	2. Chapter 2

"As this arrangement begins to unfold," Stern said, coming to stand beside him at the window. "I would appreciate having some forewarning as to your management style. It will aid me in fulfilling my job to the best of my ability." It was the end of their second day together, and she'd spent it familiarizing herself with the layout of the building, command chain, and technological nuances. She'd performed every task he'd given her, along with a few he hadn't.

Jedikiah's sharp and hooded blue eyes searched the jasper ones of his newest employee, deciding how best to answer. It took him a minute to quantify, during which they stood silhouetted by the setting sun beaming between buildings, their lengthening shadows spilling across the floor. "A perfectionist," he said finally, cold and pristine as a Himalayan mountain craig. "I am one myself, and I expect nothing less from my employees. I expect it at their detriment, hazard, and expense."

Stern nodded slowly, thoughtfully. She turned her gaze to the orange and gold sky. "Would you consider yourself fair?" she continued, neutral as the gray of her button down blouse. Her voice was, perhaps, softened by the intimidation she found in his words.

"Scarcely. Do you think you can handle that?" he challenged.

Her lashes were long enough to shadow her cheeks. "Definitely."

Jedikiah thought she looked like a sword in a forge: tones of gray outfit painted with tones of fire. "Then we'll get along just fine."

The building was starting to empty. Jedikiah was planning on staying late. It seemed she was, too. "What about you?" he asked, putting his hands in his pockets. "What makes Laura Stern tick?"

It was almost poetic, the way the sun slid behind the skyline just as a sly look slid onto her face. Seeing it reflected in the glass made Jedikiah's gut twist with unexpected lust.

 

By the time the building began to fill for the next working day, a shiny new Level 7 clearance badge was handed off to Jedikiah just after eight. It was, in his humble opinion, late: cardmaking machines be damned. The office gopher was practically quaking by the time Jedikiah had finished reaming him a new ass in a tone bland enough to teethe babies on.

"I want these items," he handed the sweating man a sheet from his memo pad. "Delivered to my office by tomorrow morning. Stern will direct you where to put them." He'd decided to let her choose: it was a plumb of her boldness. Would she nestle into his prickly world without hesitation, with the conversation they'd had the evening previous? Or would she be spooked or timid enough to set up shop in the bullpen down the hall?

"Where to put what?" asked the woman in question as she reentered the office. Laura Stern took one look at the situation (Jedikiah smirking and towering over the employee, and the employee's subsequent hunching terror), and fixed the blonde man with a glare just shy of blatantly disrespectful. The gopher, however, was given a gentle and very real smile, with lips and a hint of a dimple.

Jedikiah felt cheated. "Your desk," he replied. Giving the gopher one last soulless stare, he said, "Go."

The man took off, brushing past Stern in his haste, but directing a subtle glance of gratitude at her as he went.

The woman had the audacity to pin Jedikiah with an arched brow. "You like bullying people?" she asked pleasantly.

Jedikiah strode languidly back to his desk chair, came to rest, and with a smile replied, "Maybe."

Stern cranked the glare up a notch, shook her head, and went back to work, sitting on the farther end of the couch.

Jedikiah slipped the new clearance badge into his pocket without a word.

He left to oversee some agent training sessions, looking to put some performance pressure on the recruits. Through the glass wall of the gym, he could watch them grapple on the mat, lift weights, and hone their preternatural powers.

Jedikiah found gratification in watching their difficult attempts to best their trainers with and without using their powers. He could not deny that he was looking for cracks, or that he enjoyed causing them. But even their nervousness and conscientious blunders didn't lighten the needling prick beneath his ribs. When a blonde trainee teleported herself into a steel barbell rack, he went on his way.

There was not an object small enough to compare to the fuck he did not give about Stern's disapproval. And yet this was the closest he, a grown man, had come to sullen in a long time.

On the way back, he encountered his pouting nephew, who still had earplugs draped around his neck. "Stephen," he greeted, unreasonably pleased to realize someone else's dourness. "How'd the firing range go?"

The dark-browed youth scowled even deeper and growled, "My trainer's a bi- "

"Language," cut in Jedikiah, falling into step next to the teen. "I'll not have a hostile working environment." Unless he caused it, that is.

The teenager sighed. "Well, she is. I hit seven out of ten on my first go, and she still slaughtered me."

"Is seven-out-of-ten the same attitude you apply to your studies?" asked the man archly.

Stephen rolled his eyes. "No..."

"Then practice," urged Jedikiah, putting a hand on Stephen's shoulder. "Walk with me, I want to talk to you about having dinner again with your mom and brother."

The plans were tentatively set by the time they entered his office. Stephen stepped into the room, then abruptly did a double-take at the woman on the couch. "Erm, hello," he stammered.

Stern looked up at him clinically from a comparison of two heavily highlighted papers. "Hello."

Jedikiah rolled his eyes, proving which side of the family Stephen got it from. "Stephen, this is my new secretary, Laura Stern. Stern, this is my nephew, would-be agent Stephen Jameson."

Stern rose gracefully, brushing down her pencil skirt (black today, with silver hair sticks) and extended a hand towards the youth. "A pleasure, Stephen."

Jedikiah watched the exchange with detached interest. He noted the difference in Stern's tone when she addressed Stephen. She sounded like she was calming a scared animal. Clearly, there was experience with teenagers behind it.

Stephen, on the other hand, was practically radiating hormones and stumbling over his words like he was three. Stern navigated the conversation with an ease that saved the young man's pride: asking polite questions about where he went to school, how his training was proceeding.

Finally, Jedikiah put them out of his misery. "Stephen, don't you have hand-to-hand with Simpson?"

"Oh, right," said the youth, sounding disappointed. With a glance at his cell phone for the time, he stiffened. "Gotta go. Nice to meet you, Laura!"

The secretary's eyes widened, and her head dipped in a glower. The boy was already gone, but she planted her hands on her hips and muttered towards the door, "Excuse me?"

Jedikiah hid a chuckle.

The day passed amicably enough. He left periodically to grease certain wheels, and to meet a politician for brunch.

It was when Jedikiah checked his phone's calendar for the time to meet with R&D that his eyes narrowed. The previous meeting's minutes were attached. He hadn't done that himself.

"Stern," he muttered. Yet again, he could not fault her for doing what, though unbidden, was her job. He had given her his security clearance card, after all. Of course she would utilize it to perform her job to the utmost: it was what made her a desirable employee. It had not occurred to him that the repercussions would spill over so rapidly into his linked devices.

He should have expected it. Hell, he should have expected her. As he kept reminding himself, she was his personal secretary. The barriers were bound to start tumbling, eventually. With a sigh, he touched the pocket that held Stern's newly minted clearance.

As he approached his office again, he noted animated voices coming from within. After spooking two snickering, leery male trainees away from the door with a growl, Jedikiah strode inside to find Stern standing incredibly close to Stephen, seemingly correcting his Isosceles stance. Their backs were to the door, so Jedikiah leaned against the jamb, crossed one foot jauntily, and waited for them to notice him.

"Engage your core muscles," Stern instructed briskly, tapping Stephen's toned stomach with - a ruler?

The youth nodded eagerly, tightening his grip on Jedikiah's stapler. The fog of fuckability was rolling off him in waves, but Stern seemed unaffected, or else subtly amused.

"Pull with this hand." Her chin practically rested on his shoulder as she checked the angle and lifted him with a touch of the ruler. Jedikiah bit back a surprised grunt of arousal, knowing her lovely breasts were brushing against Stephen so casually. "And push with the other," continued Stern.

With the ruler tracing Stephen's arms methodically slow in illustration, Stern's voice dropped into a hypnotically smooth register that seemed designed to break a man of his cognition - and make him enjoy it. "The energy from the bullet - or in your case, tranq - enters through one arm, travels across the chest, and terminates through the other in a cyclic motion. When performed well, it minimizes kickback and allows you to fire rapidly."

Her chest brushed Stephen's back as she balanced the thin wooden instrument over the youth's open elbow. "Don't drop it," she warned, close to his ear.

If Jedikiah had to lick his suddenly dry lips, that was between him and God.

"Fire."

Stephen fired off a staple with perfect posture. Turning with a beaming (and admittedly awed) smile, he noticed Jedikiah propped in the doorframe and promptly froze. "Uncle!" he said, voice squeaking on the uptake.

"Mr. Price," greeted Stern like she'd known he was there all along, which was a distinct possibility, judging by the gleam in her eye. "Your nephew's trainer is concerningly ineffective. She didn't even teach Stephen how to stance properly."

"So I gather," Jedikiah remarked, stepping fully inside. "I'll have a word with the trainer. Thank you for your assistance, Stern." Pegging the lightly sweating young man with a flinty smile, Jedikiah said, "Don't you have homework?"

"Um, yes! I do!" Leaving only a cloud of pheromones to indicate his presence, Stephen scampered. "Thanks, Stern!"

Stern watched him go with a quirk of her mouth. When she caught Jedikiah watching her, she shrugged. "He was... lurking, for lack of a better term. I needed to set a standard." She stooped to pick up the ruler, dragging it through her palm with an air of absent threat. "'Laura' is not an acceptable standard."

"I can understand how, by working for Ultra, you are experienced with firearms," Jedikiah began. "However, that ruler game you bring begs the question... did you ever attend Catholic school?"

"No," Stern sighed wistfully. "But I wanted to."

Jedikiah processed this as he fished in his pocket. "Here's your clearance," he said, sliding the card across the desk.

"Thank you," she replied, clipping it to her own lapel. "I was wondering when you'd finally hand it over." She gave him a look over her shoulder as she meandered back to her couch that could have frozen a small mammal in place.

Jedikiah thrilled to the game. "I'd like mine back," he said, signing into his computer to feign disinterest.

Stern, too, signed into her laptop, and did not deign to look at him. "I'm afraid it's in use, and cannot be returned at this time." She made a very convincing show of looking at her ladies' watch. "It should be back in your care in approximately four hours."

Jedikiah tamped down on the twitch in his eye. It was the exact amount of time he'd held onto her card.

Damn, she was a power trip - with emphasis on trip - in T-strap heels.

And damn, if he didn't admire her for it. Nobody had gone toe to toe with him like this since... well, ever.

"Very well," he replied with a glower she didn't acknowledge. He'd pick his battles. As long as the card didn't leave the building, he couldn't phone security that it was stolen. They'd read the tracker imbedded in the card and laugh at him. And he certainly didn't want to explain how his petite secretary was holding it hostage.

Jedikiah tended his cropped up inbox as he tended his warmed blood.

Three o'clock came, and he was momentarily distracted from the machete-worthy weeding of his inbox by the sound of bones creaking. Stern stood up with a stretch, wandered over to the Kuerig and twirled the K-cup carousel thoughtfully. All the supervisors had them in their offices, stocked with their preference. Jedikiah didn't much care, usually taking his coffee at home with the newspaper.

Jedikiah watched surreptitiously, curious to see what she'd pick from the vast array. The office rats had acknowledged his lack of a preference when installing the machine by giving him, essentially, one of everything.

Stern settled on an English Breakfast, stamped it in, and stood over it while it percolated. "My vice," she said, pitched for him to hear.

"Come again?" he asked, sounding bored enough to convince her he wasn't eyeing up her lovely posterior, on display by her heels. How had he not noticed that before? He shook his head.

"Tea. It's my singular vice." As the machine gurgled to a halt, she lifted the steaming cup and went back to her workspace. "I don't drink alcohol, smoke, or engage in recreational drugs. I'm a vegan. Tea is my one and only habit." With a careful sip, she gave an honest exhale. "What about you?"

He paused in mid-signature. The empty gesture of giving him a so-called weakness was a mockery he could not call her on. So instead, he replied, "Coffee in the morning. A stiff brandy, on occasion." Slipping the word 'stiff' into the conversation was an added bonus.

She hummed in pleasant acceptance, and they descended into work again.

Jedikiah watched, peeking from the corners of his eyes, as the brew rendered its magic on the severe Stern. As she steadily moved through the thick paper file on her lap, redacting the virtual copy on her laptop as needed, her spine began to soften, and her muscles slowly uncoiled. The change in her demeanor was palpable, considering she'd been tight with righteous indignation at his card stunt and tense with delight at their game.

Six o'clock came and went with Jedikiah in the trenches of a four-way Skype conference with the leaders of Ultra annexes outside the country. Between the Middle Easterner's thick accent and the Korean's implacability, he was in a foul mood by the time the disconnect screen showed.

The building was empty, eerily so, as the regular employees had gone home to their families. With a tired sigh nobody was allowed to hear, Jedikiah made his way back to his floor, taking the stairs to work off some disgruntlement.

As he rounded the corner into his hall, a piece of plastic wrapping protruding from his door made him frown. A high-pitched whirring sound deepened the creases. It had to be the gopher delivering Stern's office.

Creeping closer and hoping to startle the poor man, he was given a treated sight. The same posterior he'd been eyeing over the Kuerig was now stuck out at an attractive angle from under a half-assembled desk. The desk was inside the office.

Jedikiah was only a human man, after all. He propped himself against the hallway wall and observed unabashedly.

That delightful bunch of muscle flexed as Stern grunted delicately, activating the cordless screwdriver again. She'd managed to erect the shell of the desk, and him, while she was at it.

The man clambered out of the gutter with a loud clearing of his throat and explosive knock. The bang of her head on the underside was almost comical. "Having fun?" he asked sardonically. He was a bit edgier than usual after that shitstorm of a teleconference.

She withdrew her head with a wince and a rub, sitting back on her shoeless and hosed heels. "Loads, actually. It's missing eight screws. I can't mount the cabinets without them."

Feeling his oats, Jedikiah crouched next to her, looking into the footwell of the desk. DIY projects tended to energize him, but there was no need to advertise that. "What are those, three-eighths?" he asked casually, almost to himself.

"Three-sixteenths, actually," Stern replied, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. She dragged a half-complete drawer closer and threaded a screw through the handle, studiously not facing him.

He recognized a defense when he saw one, and with a bitten back grin, he realized it was due to his proximity. "Can I have my card back now?" he asked, though it was in no way a question.

Stern pinked slightly, but found the brazenness to look at him. "Trade you some screws."

'Trade' and 'screw' in the same sentence didn't help his self-control. "It's hardly a trade," he pointed out. "You're going to give it back, anyway."

She ticked an eyebrow and leveled a devilish smile on him, so different than the previous two he'd witnessed, and did not reply.

Jedikiah stood, spun on his heel, and stalked off before he did something rash. The whir of the screwdriver started up again before he was out of earshot. He located the nearest janitor's closet and fished around until he found a hefty toolbox, then hauled it back to the room.

"It won't fit through the door," he commented offhandedly. "The desk."

Stern looked up at him, startled by his sudden presence enough to show a blink's breadth of insecurity. "Is that a problem?"

He gave her his best lion's eyes. "Not at all."

 

Jedikiah held the drawer array in place as Stern screwed them in, clearly at ease with the task, though it put her completely curled up in the footwell. "I had to assemble all my furniture," she said, by way of an explanation.

"I do a little carpentry," he admitted. Then, raising the stakes, he elaborated, "Mostly birdhouses."

There was a barely quelled snort of laughter, the evidence of which was gone by the time she ducked free to look at him. "Birdhouses," she deadpanned. With an air of disbelief, she went back to screwing. "I would have guessed bookshelves."

Jedikiah genuinely scowled. "Bookshelves are a pain. Birds don't care if everything is perfectly level."

He might have been mistaken, but he thought he caught another, gentler snort. "Indeed." Stern scooted out from under the desk, finally giving Jedikiah a feel for her height without heels. She came barely to his chin.

Dragging her completed office chair into place, she sat down, propped her heels on the desk, and crossed them. Without a word, she slipped two fingers between her blouse buttons, withdrew his security clearance card, and handed it to him.

Jedikiah took it back, and let his fingers touch hers with intentional firmness. There was the slightest hint of moisture on the card, and it was tantalizingly warm.


	3. Chapter 3

They were at the end of a weekly debriefing (re: check-in, threat-renewal, whip-cracking), sitting across Jedikiah's desk. Even though Jedikiah had the chair of power behind the desk, somehow, the authority it subtly granted him was dwarfed and mocked by the grey-suited man on the other side.

"If I may ask," Jedikiah said, with the clear indication that he very well would, fuck you very much. "Why would you saddle me with a secretary?"

The Founder cocked his head, forming his beard around a smile. "Is it really your place to question my motives?" queried the Essex accent serenely.

"Call it an affront to my competency," Jedikiah remanded, not dissuaded.

The prying eyes landed on him, power pooling in their dark depths. "Believe me, Mr. Price," he hummed. "If I were dissatisfied by your work, you would have no doubts."

A very mild shiver made Jedikiah's scalp crawl. Rather than press his luck, he gambled on silence.

"The organization is picking up pace," the Founder said finally, dismissively. "I simply thought you could use a hand. The best hand in Ultra. A hand personally vouched for by me." The man paused to change his crossed legs, the palpable bear of his gaze remaining on the blonde man. "Do you find Laura Stern to be inadequate?" he asked benignly.

Jedikiah could roll the dice and say yes, she wasn't up to snuff. But that lie might land him in trouble if the psychic occupying one of the lean metal chairs before his desk put his significant power to work verifying the statement. And even if Jedikiah wasn't found to be a liar, he might simply be throwing away a lesser of two evils: the Founder might give him another, less capable secretary. Frankly, he already had Stern trained. It was easier to just keep her.

"No," Jedikiah said evenly. "She's the best, like you said."

The Founder smiled. "Indeed." After a moment's pause, a genuine tone of humor colored his voice. "Have you gotten her to make coffee yet?"

Jedikiah hid his momentary confusion well. "No."

The smile turned secretive. "Maybe you will. She declined to do so for me even once during the four months she worked in my office."

"Why?" Jedikiah asked, bemused.

The Founder made a motion with his hand that was part dismissive, part knowing. "When I read her mind during the interview process, I could only see that she would not, but not the reason. I got the distinct impression that it was significant to her, somehow."

Now Jedikiah was befuddled on two fronts: why the Founder would indulge in such idle gossip, and why Stern had such a loathing for coffee. The Founder bid him a mildly threatening goodbye, and strode from the room, leaving Jedikiah to puzzle.

 

Jedikiah was under no illusions: Stern hated his guts. He was ruthless, gave her far too much work, far too little credit, and zero thanks.

He hated Stern's guts, in turn. She was pretty (like a decorative sheath on a knife), far too intelligent (she handled him, and it was usually days later he figured it out, if at all), and keenly sarcastic ("Making your coffee is not in my job description."). She was with him without his consent, but his hands were tied by the Essex-accented bastard.

But somehow, a kind of uneasy respect grew up like new spring grass. Jedikiah found her personality as unyielding as her name, and in knowing as much, he found a bizarre, backwards sort of comfort.

There were times when Stern initiated hostility, and after a few instances, Jedikiah discovered its purpose.

It was an hour after Jedikiah's kidnapping by John's hands came to a close. He walked into the office on the phone with the field team, who were trying to find the Tomorrow People's hideout according to the memories gleaned from Jedikiah's mind.

He hated having his mind scanned. Detested it with all his being. Jedikiah was angry, tired, and hungry.

The first thing out of Stern's matte burgundy lips was, "Apple called. They want your iPhone 3 for the museum. Does it come with or without the abacus?"

When he had to roll heads, shoot things, scold his errant nephew, and generally pretend he gave a shit about anything but humans, it would happen. As soon as Jedikiah flopped into his office chair, he would receive an uber-polite quasi-insult from Stern.

His response to these comments was always a sneer, but it gave him redirection for his anger.

 

Sitting on a new breakout's house and waiting for the young man to show his face was textbook. Jedikiah had written himself into the mission with the express purpose of getting out of the office. He'd left all his paperwork and calls to Stern.

He was looking forward to this. There was no potential in this breakout as an agent, no one else in the house, and no reason to hold back. Jedikiah was relishing the opportunity to put down a threat to the human race. With extreme prejudice.

Being cramped up in a surveillance vehicle disguised as a cable company van with three agents, two of them Tomorrow People, had not been Jedikiah's expectation. But the telepaths confirmed what the infrared camera said with each sweep: the young man was inside.

"We've got dampers on the whole place," the senior agent said, cocking his pistol. "Let's go get him." Jedikiah had agreed.

The simple extermination mission had gone to shit.

Next thing Jedikiah knew, the senior agent was writhing on the ground with a face full of salt shot. The breakout had found his ideal home defense gun. Unlike the Ultra agents' pistols and tranqs, this gun did not have a silencer. A firefight ensued.

At some point, Jedikiah was shoved down a flight of stairs. It was a mercifully short flight, but he bumped his head enough to see stars.

The neighbors called the police, and the officers screeched up just as the breakout fired his last round. Before the cops broke down the door, Jedikiah managed to put a bullet in the breakout's brain. They teleported out in time.

Medical, combat, and termination reports all had to be written, checked, and filed. However, the medical ward had swallowed him whole and refused to spit him out again without eight stitches in the back of his head.

When Jedikiah finally flopped down into his office chair with blood under his fingernails, his hair and suit a mess, and a literal fuckton of paperwork, Stern was there to greet him.

"I've never seen yellow gold cuff links with a white gold tie clip," she commented blithely. "Is that a trend?"

Jedikiah refrained - barely - from swearing or firing her despite the Founder's orders.

"And also, your shoe is untied."

Later that night, as he nursed a brandy and an icepack in the comfort of his own home, he marveled at how she'd taken the sting right out of the botched mission.

 

A breakout that had eluded capture in Canada for years jumped the border. They apprehended the man after a few terse hours, and Jedikiah plunged the needle into the man's neck with malicious glee.

The sister office wasn't pleased with that.

"He was ours," snapped the Canadian director in a colonized French accent. His tone bespoke much stronger sentiments barely contained. "He's a Canadian national that happened to drop into your sandbox. You had no right to decommission him."

"I had every right," rejoined Jedikiah with calmness he didn't feel. "He put two of my agents - good agents (he meant human)- in the medical ward." What he wanted to say was, "You're lucky we didn't euthanize him."

After twenty minutes of increasingly hostile arguing, Jedikiah was reaching the end of his patience. Expedition arrangements scarcely got made before the call devolved into thinly guised posturing and pleasant threats.

"I'll see you soon, eh?" rumbled the Canadian.

"Come by my office anytime," Jedikiah fronted sweetly. Putting down the phone with exaggerated care, he gave a low growl that turned into an even lower groan.

"Good times," muttered Stern, posture impeccable from her new desk across the room. The smell of permanent marker permeated the air as she scrubbed some files of pertinent detail. She'd arranged her office-within-an-office perpendicular to his desk, so Jedikiah had a profile of her body and she could view the visitors.

Of all things, she'd opted to give him a profile view of Pilates legs and balconette bra silhouette. Why had he allowed her to set up shop in his office, again? Right. He wanted her close enough to harass.

"The best it ever gets," he replied, scrubbing his face. "When it comes to our sister Ultra."

"May I make a suggestion?" Stern asked, with complete tact.

"By all means," said Jedikiah, too irked to care.

"An expansion of the intranet system of protocol manuals might prove useful in situations such as this." Capping her Sharpie, she sidled closer. "It'd allow our agents to see Canadian protocols alongside ours. The Canadian Ultras interrogate captured Homo Superiors before decommissioning them. That's harder to do without holding their powers as a bargaining chip."

Jedikiah contemplated this over steepled fingers. "They don't honor that kind of bargaining chip. Canada decoms as many as us."

"That's not the point," Stern replied, standing in front of his desk. "You cockblocked them. They're angry because now they can't hunt down his buddies."

Jedikiah had never heard that term used with such flippancy in an office setting, but refused to let his reflexive humor show. Tapping his index fingers together in thought, he asked, "Do you think that this intranet idea would smooth some feathers?"

"It'd show you were willing to oblige them in the future." She quirked her mouth, eyes dancing. "And perhaps installing a hotline."

Jedikiah's stormy face was tempered by the joke. "No thanks," he replied dryly. "I've had enough French accents for a lifetime."

Stern shifted her stack of files to unclip a smartphone from her slender hip. "I'll call his secretary. We're on a first-name basis. She'll breeze it past him, and she and I will set it up." Stern tilted her head at him, almost as an afterthought. "May I take liberties to include access to the new material in the next office-wide tech update?"

Jedikiah waved permission, and found himself mollified by getting to actually grant Stern a request. Doubtless, she could have acceptably taken the liberty without asking. Somehow, she knew that asking him for something reaffirmed his sense of control.

She'd let go of her pride to rescue his. Jedikiah wasn't sure how to take that.

"Cockblocked, huh?" he questioned casually as she walked towards the door. "You know anything about that?"

Stern half-turned to grant him a laugh, his first. It was an unabashed thing that momentarily stunned him in its youthfulness. But she did not respond to his question in words. As she disappeared down the hall, red soles flashing, he heard her voice on the phone, "Hello, Iris! It's Laura. Tell me you heard all that..."

 

Not two days later, the Canadian director made a surprise visit.

On his way back upstairs from a late lunch, Jedikiah only heard about it secondhand from a tech guy who'd happened to be installing Stern's Ethernet at the time of the confrontation.

"He sounded like he was jonesin' for a throw-down," commented the techie, who seemed eager to repeat the account, for some reason. "Comin' all the way here, lookin' for you, Mr. Price."

"Where is he now?" Jedikiah asked placidly. A Southern IT guy was almost too much of an oxymoron for Jedikiah to handle, but he clung on.

"Stern's got him touring the mainframe on her arm," emphasized the nerd. "And get this: he came in all thunder and flash, but when he walked out with her, he was whistlin' Dixie and smilin' like a jackass chewin' briars."

Although Jedikiah had reached his limit of bumpkin quotes for the day, he dismissed the man with a nod and entered his office. On the screen of Stern's new desktop, the intranet was open and the Canadian protocol manual was up.

Stern reappeared some thirty minutes later, slightly pink in the cheeks. "Sorry about that," she said. "I meant to have that report finished by the time you got back, but I got waylaid."

"So I hear," Jedikiah replied evenly. "And was there any substance to the good man's visit?"

Stern psshed. "Not a lick. Some thin excuse about settling differences like professionals. According to Iris, he's just on a layover between flights." As Stern's fingertips splayed over her keyboard, she paused, and a concerned wrinkle sprung up between her eyes. "I didn't offend you, did I?" she asked, sounding genuinely worried. "By taking him on?"

Jedikiah couldn't resist letting the silence hang a moment longer than necessary. "No," he finally replied. "What Frenchie and I have to say to each other isn't in the best interests of our continued cooperation. He'll blow over soon enough." At her released breath, he added, "No cockblocking occurred."

Stern swiveled her chair to face him with a humored reproachfulness that made his smirk widen. "You cruel man," she muttered, fighting the twitch of her dimple.

"And Stern?"

"Yes, sir?"

"Don't fight my battles for me." Her only saving grace was that he'd been out of the office at the time. If she'd tried to sweep Canada's leg while he was present, he'd have chewed her up one side and down the other.

"Wouldn't dream of it, sir."

He winked. He did so enjoy pushing her buttons. If he got to see that face, drawn between acquiescence and a glower, he'd be doing it more often.

The next day when he booted up his computer, a tiny calendar counter in the corner of the screen read: "2" days since the last CB alert.

 

The ease with which Jedikiah and Stern conformed to their working relationship both astonished and disturbed Jedikiah. It wasn't because he was trying. In fact, he was deliberately not trying. But despite his slack hand, Stern took every assignment, every task, and turned it into gold.

On occasions when her Midas touch proved too little a reaction for his liking, Jedikiah found it necessary to play hardball. When he clued into her affinity for the Miami Dolphins, he programmed her computer to make a dolphin's cackle with each click.

After ten solid minutes of hiding his smile, she switched to her tablet in stony silence.

The next time he ordered sushi for delivery during a lunchtime teleconference, the wasabi, which he detested, was evenly distributed across each piece. The seal on the container was mysteriously unbroken, and he spent a good portion of time pondering how the hell...?

Jedikiah's shorthand during meetings was legendarily only decipherable by himself or an Ultra cryptologist. To combat Stern's assimilation, he periodically changed some words to Spanish, sat back, and watched the show. By the time Stern figured out she wasn't in the ballpark, she was so cranked up she'd ripped her hairsticks out and was absently, though heartlessly, stabbing the individual pockets out of a piece of bubble wrap.

Somehow, his computer started to announce everything it did in Greek. The Southern IT guy made another appearance. ("What does malaka mean, anywho? It's the defaulted username.")

 

Over the course of several weeks, Jedikiah watched from afar as she navigated her new world, one ruled by men, like a ship in home waters. Stern learned the names of possibly everybody on this and the immediate two floors. They started to come to her as a sounding board for everything from fraternization policies (which were mercifully loose in Ultra, mostly divided along the lines of species) to formatting aid ("I find Times New Roman a good font for addendums. Serifs make the heart grow fonder.")

Stern rarely loosed a full smile, but somehow, her expression toed the line between detached neutrality and recognition of everyone's equality. The only time the latter slipped out of place was when she had contact with Jedikiah. Then, she seemed to take the utmost care to show cool respect that somehow begrudged him his authority.

He found himself wanting to smash her frosty shell, light her up with emotion, with passion. The only thing she seemed truly passionate about was exacting perfection in her work.

But Stern was also tough, accepting no quarter for inadequacy. Jedikiah heard her side of a dressing-down and was mildly impressed at her spine.

"Agent Lancer," she'd said, like velvet wrapped in steel. "Your physical correlation to other agents, as detailed in your mission reports, is sorely lacking in accuracy."

A pause.

"I understand you were teleporting around. I do not, however, see how that affects your capacity to note where you were."

Another pause.

"Then I guess you'll have to go back out there and retrace your steps. Also," she crossed her ankles and settled them on her desk, spreading out a handful of papers in scrawled handwriting and bled on by the Highlighter of Doom. "There are serious discrepancies between how many shots you fired, and how many your fellow agents fired. This is true across your last five mission reports."

Yet another pause, wherein she artfully twirled a pen over her knuckles, eyes closed. "Because it's my job to note weaknesses, Agent Lancer. I am signing you in for five hours of firing range time. You must complete it and renew your evaluation grade before I take the hold off your mission readiness." Her voice dropped an octave, though the inflections were sweeter than honey. "If your next report isn't accurate, I will repeat the process. Have a nice day."

Jedikiah had his chin in one hand when she opened her eyes. "I think I understand, now," he commented. "Why you prefer to be called Stern."

She didn't reply save for a faint blush under her foundation and started to type.

Jedikiah surreptitiously readjusted himself in his pants and did the same.

 

His was one of roughly ten cars in the parking deck, and he sat in the darkness of the plush interior, waiting. It was an idle curiosity to discover which car she drove. Would it be the red Honda? the silver Impala? the late-model forest Jeep?

She traipsed out roughly five minutes after him, unlocked a peacock teal Prius, and drove off without noticing him.

Jedikiah smiled. A sensible car in a wild, rich color. He wondered if the collision of two ideals also applied to her underwear.

 

A month passed, then two.

Jedikiah wasn't sure when he started to notice, really.

Stern came to work in various professional attire. She wore her hair high, heels higher, and the only real variation was in the texture or basic color of her outfits. Always a skirt. Always a pressed blouse. A demure manicure.

The only thing that didn't change was the woman's watch on her right wrist.

Stern only ever fiddled with it when a breakout was dragged, kicking and screaming in repressor cuffs, past the door on the way to the holding cells. As the cries faded with distance, Stern would portray, as kinesic specialists would call it, a self-touch gesture. Her left hand would find the face of the watch, moving over it in a tight circle as though ensuring it was intact.

Jedikiah noticed she did it when Stephen and other agents with powers come into his office, too.

And that piqued his interest, most of all...


	4. Chapter 4

One morning, Jedikiah called Stern and told her to purchase Starbucks for him on the way into the office. He'd run out of grounds that morning. It was then he confirmed that Stern had a serious, deep-seated issue with bringing him coffee, and no issues letting it air. The Founder had not been kidding.

"No," she said over the phone, so frosty Jedikiah expected the device to freeze to his palm.

"Pardon?" he asked, cocking an unseen brow.

"I am not an office gopher," she continued. "I am a professional woman with three degrees and years of experience. I do not fetch coffee like a common phone rat."

"It is well within my authority to insist," Jedikiah replied coolly. "In your job description, it clearly says, 'perform other tasks as assigned'."

"The implication, as my paralegal degree would concur, is that those tasks are office-, job-, and work-related," she countered. "I'm sure my union rep would also agree." A horn honked distantly. "Excuse me, before I cause an accident by talking to you before my workday."

The line went dead. Jedikiah made certain he was not in the office, or even on the same floor, when she came in. He left an unreasonably tall pile of work on her desk, went to an early lunch. When he returned, he took his time studying the livid hold of her shoulders.

 

People began to treat Stern like the oracle priestess to Jedikiah's deity; her mouth, his words. If Jedikiah was out of the office, Stern would pick up his phone in the most impossibly happy voice, "Hello, this is Stern speaking for Mr. Price."

Jedikiah discovered it useful, and allowed it to continue.

Most of the time, she would completely handle the situation on the other end, make a note of it on his pad, and go about her business. One time, however, Stern hunted him down. The result was a downward spiral of epic proportions.

Jedikiah leaned over a struggling woman strapped to a decommission chair. "Alexa... Kirsch, is it?" he began, smooth as silk, flipping through her file.

Alexa was keeping the tightest hold on her mouth as anyone Jedikiah ever seen. He was unimpressed. They all broke down, eventually.

"You have one hell of a record with us, Alexa," he said. "You've snatched several breakouts right out of our field agents' hands. As you can imagine, we hate that." He closed the file with a snap. "Would you care to tell me where your little pack of street rats hides out?"

Alexa was fixated on the ceiling like it was the center of her universe, but still pulling on the leather restraints that dented her skin.

"No?" inferred Jedikiah. "Suit yourself."

He ran his hands over the array of vials on the steel surgical cart next to them, and said, almost conversationally, "Did you know I have a Doctorate in evolutionary biology?"

The woman, who was around thirty with eyes hollowed by hunger, continued to fight the bonds and eye him with renewed hatred and caution.

"As head of this branch of Ultra," he continued, holding one vial up to the light for inspection. "This suits me well, as you can imagine. But I don't do as much of the research as I'd like anymore," he said with a sigh, hefting a needle gun and inserting the vial in the chamber. "Despite this, I try very hard to stay current with my skills."

Lightning fast, he plunged the needle into the woman's arm, not injecting the liquid.

She yelped in shock, but he pinned her further by the shoulder.

"The only difference," he said, head lowering to the woman's ear. "Between the serum that strips you of your powers, and the compound that induces severe nerve pain, is only one digit in the empirical formula. And for the life of me, I can't seem to remember which is which."

The woman's eyes widened, and she started to tremble under his hand.

"So let's play a little game," suggested Jedikiah amicably. "Which do you think is loaded in this needle right now: nerve pain, or power stripper?"

He pulled the trigger, emptying the contents into the woman's bloodstream. It was nerve pain compound, of course: she had information he wanted. But it would take a minute to reach full, howling effect.

A knock came on the cell door. Jedikiah's head snapped up. After a pause, the knock came again. With a scowl, Jedikiah replaced the needle gun on the tray and strode over to yank open the door.

Stern stood at parade rest in the hallway. "Am I interrupting?" she asked, looking coolly past him at the woman, whose body was starting to lock up in pain.

"Yes, actually, Stern," he replied longsufferingly. Over his shoulder, he told the shuddering Alexa, "I have the neutralizer right there, on the tray. When you get sick of it, just scream."

Jedikiah stepped fully into the hall, but left the door ajar to monitor the woman. "What is it, Stern?"

"The mainframe is going down for a temporary fix," she stated. She seemed to be schooling her expression to passivity. Was she disturbed by the little shrieks starting to fight their way past Alexa's clenched jaw? "I've r-rerouted your calls to your cell phone."

Jedikiah tactfully ignored her stutter. He had no time for a lack of gall. "And you felt the need to tell me in person because...?"

"I figured you wouldn't want your phone blowing up with calls while you were... occupied," she explained, wincing at the sounds of Alexa's distress. "I'll take it off your hands for a bit, if you'd like."

Jedikiah opened his mouth to speak, but had no opportunity.

Alexa screeched. But the noise was only a prelude to what came next.

A wave of psychic pain echoed what came out of Alexa's mouth, stabbing Jedikiah's brain like a knife cleaving the hemispheres. He staggered under the power of it with a shout of pain. The rebounded anguish of a body made manifest in another's mind threatened to cripple him, clutching his head.

Jedikiah heard Stern scream like a banshee as he thrust back into the room and scrabbled for a new vial and the needle gun. Outside the room, all down the hall, he could hear other people yelling in confusion and pain.

He drew back the plunger and stabbed the liquid home, not caring if the dosage of sedative was accurate. In less than ten seconds of teeth-clenching pain, the sedative started to work. Alexa uncoiled on the table like a deflating balloon, falling into deep unconsciousness.

Jedikiah gasped as the pain abated. He stumbled back into the hallway to find Stern collapsed against the wall with her hands over her ears and tears streaking down her face. She was drawn up into a ball of legs and elbows that imitated a turtle in its shell.

"Stern, look at me!" he commanded, crouching beside the secretary. He peeled her hands off her head and tipped her eyes to the light, checking her pupil dilation. "You're fine, you're okay," he assured: her or himself, he was uncertain.

"What..." she panted, jasper eyes glazed with pain meeting his. "The hell?"

Jedikiah's thumb was over her sharp, wet cheekbone, and he unconsciously swiped at the moisture under the pad, the soft skin just under her eye. The effect was for him to jerk back like he'd been branded. "It happens," Jedikiah summarized with all the levelness he could muster. "Their power can override the suppressor cuffs. I left the door cracked, it's my fault the room dampeners didn't work." He would berate himself later.

He straightened, looking down at his crumpled secretary. It was the most bedraggled he'd ever seen her, and it tugged on some previously unknown thread connecting his coiling gut with his heart. Jedikiah had a brief, intense flash of jerking her into his chest, holding her there despite her protests as he attacked her mouth, bent her over his arm with the force...

Keeping the internal war under careful but thin wraps, he extended his hand to Stern.

Stern's expression was still dazed, but she regarded the hand he offered like an unexpected courtesy. Her eyes glanced up to his, briefly, mouth slightly parted in surprise. Jedikiah hadn't shaken hands with her since starting her employ, and hadn't given even a pretense of courtesy, at all.

Slender fingers wrapped around his, strength and delicacy combined, as he pulled her to her feet. She suddenly stiffened and went spectacularly pale. Jedikiah thought she's stood too fast and was dizzy with bloodrush. Just as he twitched to bracket her bracingly, to prevent her listing over, he noticed what she was staring at.

"No," she whispered, examining the watch on her wrist. "No, no." The watch face was cracked.

"What is it?" Jedikiah asked. He wasn't getting the full picture, here.

She was staring at the small cracked glass with horror. Snapping out of it with a swallow, her gaze flitted up to his before a mask dropped like a steel door. "It's... it's nothing. It's just special to me, that's all."

Jedikiah sighed and let it go. The klaxons shut off in mid-whoop, and the flashing lights retracted into the wall. Shouts and bustling echoed on both ends of the secluded hall. The entire research department and most everyone with a gun were bearing down on them. "Take the rest of the day," he ordered, drawing himself to his full height in preparation for war.

Stern fixed him with a stubborn look that, on her disheveled face, was somewhat foxy. The black run of her mascara down her face turned to warpaint. "Not a chance, sir."

Jedikiah had to flash a smile at her tenacity, looking her over with barely veiled approval. "Then here," he said, handing over his cellphone. "Hold my calls until I get back upstairs."

"You got it," she replied resolutely. As she walked off through the descending crowd, the last vestige of sanity went with her.

 

The psychic shockwave seemed concentrated in the immediate area of the holding cell, and trailed off steeply with distance. The least affected had felt little more than a tickle through their psyche.

Jedikiah calmed the gun-toters, placated the researchers, and finished the interrogation. Over the next few days, he would coordinate the hunt for Alexa's street rats. Ultra planned to capture and decommission the six she detailed. Jedikiah had aspirations to talk one, the oldest boy, into joining Ultra to save the lives of the other six. With a few hours of manipulation and the chance to keep his powers, Jedikiah was confident an agent would be born.

Whether or not the young man would make it all the way through the training was up to Jedikiah, of course. But he wouldn't need to detail that.

When Jedikiah emerged from the interrogation room, he found his tie had somehow gotten red drips from his nosebleed on it. A stab of anger filled him, and belatedly, he marveled at how thin his nerves were. The damn freak had caused harm just by existing. Jedikiah would never be satisfied until the world was free of them. He yanked the tie free and trashed it malevolently in the nearest can.

His flagging self-control was further beaten back by the medical team who waylaid him and were too thorough in checking him over. When Jedikiah finally snapped at them and escaped, he knew he was in disarray: his shirt was wrinkled, a button missing. Everyone else affected recovered quickly, and by the time Jedikiah returned to his office, the pain in his head was a dull throb.

Stern greeted him with a sympathetic wince, a cup of Kuerig coffee, and some aspirin. "Trust me, I know."

He swallowed the pills gratefully. Any other day, he would have turned his nose up at the pseudo-brew. This time, he allowed it. "Hazards of the profession, I'm afraid."

She nodded tiredly. She'd obviously washed her face of tear/mascara residue, and it had taken most of her makeup with it. Jedikiah found there wasn't much makeup in the first place, and the bareness of her face interested him, somehow. Like he was seeing her honestly for the first time.

"Did you get checked by medical?" he asked, sipping the cup. It was actually very good, and prepared just how he usually liked it.

Stern's nose wrinkled in distaste. "Yes." Her eyes dipped to his tie-free collar and the exposed skin there. There was a flicker of something hidden by her expression. "I can see we had the same examiners." She indicated the missing button at the top of her shirt, which matched his.

The joining of two collarbones ought not be that tempting, nor a freed and graceful neck, nor the beginnings of smooth mounds... Jedikiah swallowed the mouthful too quickly and choked back a cough. That was one button too few for his tenuous grip on self-control. He forced himself to wander towards his desk, out of her scent cloud of roses, jasmine, and sandalwood. "You can still take the rest of the day," he offered thickly.

Stern smirked at him with narrowed eyes, and the expression made Jedikiah want to groan. It was not the day for him to notice all the sexy little nuances in his secretary. "You'll not be rid of me that easily," she said. Was that a teasing tone? "You'll fault me for it, I'm sure," she finished with a drop of acidity.

"You may be certain," he shot back, imitating the edge to her voice. With focused care, he set down his coffee cup and booted his computer. "Suit yourself."

"The mainframe is still down," she reminded.

Jedikiah rubbed his temples. It was not even lunchtime yet. The blonde man wanted to groan, again. "May as well get the details down while they're fresh," he sighed, pulling out his personal tablet.

He struggled to wrench his concentration onto the task at hand: making up a office-wide report to circulate, explaining what had happened. He then started a report of his own account for the file keepers, trying to wring as much detail out of his pounding skull as possible.

Stern was having similar issues. Intermittently a soft, frustrated breath left her. Jedikiah found himself unreasonably distracted by their sound. "Could you please stop that?" he asked coldly after a half-hour.

She glared up at him. "Excuse me, I'm minding my own business." There was a sharpness to her tone that he recognized as a drained feeling he had, too.

His countenance darkened. "Watch your tone with me, Miss Stern." The regression to honorifics elicited the desired reaction.

Stern glowered at him and stood, her chair hitting the wall with force. Jedikiah automatically did the same, hulking over his desk with a sneer. "Where are you going?"

"Taking the show on the road," she retorted with hostility over her retreating shoulder. "I don't have to put up with this."

"And Stern?" he projected his voice.

She stopped, half-turned stiffly.

"I thought you didn't make my coffee," he antagonized with a smug tilt of his head.

Stern hissed, clearly holding back some unprofessional expletives, growled explosively, and stalked off.

Jedikiah ground his teeth at her back, loathing the way he instantly watched her perfect ass. He all but flopped back into his chair, still angry. Clearly, they'd both been thrown for a loop by the psychic whiplash. It didn't excuse either of them, but at the same time, it did. Tensions were on the surface: in his case, the simmering sexual tension of having that fit and conservatively clad body up under him all day, every day.

His watch beeped noon. Shoving back his chair, Jedikiah stalked out of the office. As turned into the hall, a glint of silver on the floor caught his attention. It was Stern's cracked watch, dropped in her hasty exfiltration. He stuck it stormily in his pocket.

Somewhere in the cafeteria, there was meat he could sink his teeth into. Unlike that exposed collarbone...

The employees who noticed him avoided him. The ones that didn't ignored him. That was just fine with Jedikiah, who felt likely to roll some heads if he was irritated any further.

He went through the line and found a corner table unoccupied. Impaling the piece of chicken cordon blue made him feel better until he found phallic implications in the gesture. Then his brain did as it pleased.

Stephen's voice pulled him out of carnal reverie. "Hey, Uncle Jed!"

Jedikiah found his nephew staring at him pointedly, a tray in his hands. "You alright? I said your name, like, twice."

"Fine," the blonde man asserted as he latched onto the familiar annoyance. "Never better."

"I heard you got mind-whipped by an older breakout," Stephen said, plunking down the tray and taking a seat without asking. "How do you feel?"

Jedikiah gave a mirthless smile. "Super."

"Headache, right?" queried the youth, forking up his macaroni.

The man forced as much agreement into his affirmative grunt as his pride would allow.

"Those of us with powers recover faster from that sort of thing," Stephen said conversationally.

"Is that so?" Jedikiah asked blandly.

"It's worse at first, though," continued his nephew, eating with the gusto of a young man's metabolism. "I wasn't down there, but my trainer Allison said she hit the ground screaming. She got better in time to throw me around the gym."

Something clicked in Jedikiah's mind. Even at the furious peak of Alexa's psychic outpour of wrath, he'd been able to move freely enough to silence her. "Worse at first, huh?" he murmured. He pulled Stern's watch out of his pocket, examining the stopped hands. Turning it over, he saw a tiny square of nearly invisible silver duct tape on the back, where it lay against the wrist. Peeling it back revealed a tiny blue and red chip.

"What's that?" asked Stephen, who noticed his uncle's slight mania. "Looks like the guts of a dampener."

Jedikiah's plate blurred out of focus as the pieces fell into place. How Stern and he worked in such pronounced tandem, despite his slack hand. How she'd gotten so far, so fast in Ultra. How damnably, preternaturally efficient she was. How she knew he didn't like wasabi. How she always seemed to appear when he was needing her. How she predicted what he needed, laid it into his schedule without being told. How she knew to redirect his temper.

His coffee had been perfect...

Jedikiah's chest filled with cold, simmering fury. "Excuse me, Stephen," he said silkily. "I have something I need to attend to."


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Author's Note: The porn starts here, people. Don't like, don't read. In all fairness, once it starts to get hanky, you could skip down to the last few lines and get the gist without quitting the story: I'm not gonna shove it down your throat. :)  
> 

**Author's Note: The porn starts here, people. Don't like, don't read. In all fairness, once it starts to get hanky, you could skip down to the last few lines and get the gist without quitting the story: I'm not gonna shove it down your throat. :)**

 

Jedikiah stalked down the empty halls with an imperious scowl befitting a man lied to for months. A red fury churned away in his gut, and he wondered peripherally if he would actually shoot someone if they appeared across his path.

Jedikiah had learned, over the course of his embittering life, to handle all kinds of betrayal, cosmic misfortune, anger, and despondency. He could smile at his enemies and plan their deaths by bullet or a thousand paper cuts. He could work alongside the race he so detested, and run his finger over the vials of power stripping serum to assuage his hatred. He could handle his conniving nephew, for some reason he still wasn't completely certain about (but definitely included words like 'necessary evil'). He could bend to the will of the Founder, but in his heart of hearts never bow.

The world and the people in it could shit on him all they wanted: he would take it, and eventually find a way to make them pay.

The one thing - the singular thing - he did not abide by, from any family, friend, or stranger... was a lie.

Stern had lied to him. By omission, but nonetheless. He intended to make her pay.

As he rounded the corner to his office, a bizarre feeling skittered across Jedikiah's brain. It felt like a tickle to the actual organ in his skull: light and strange and a split between disconcerting and stimulating. Like a gentler version of what the Founder put him through periodically; less clinical than that of the telepathic agents under Jedikiah's command when they probed his mind for clues beyond his conscious memory.

The blonde man halted, shaking his head as he peered around. No one was there, in any room he'd passed so far on his warpath, or on either end of the hall. Even as he started onward again, it scrabbled at his mind once more, like a mouse's prickling, quick steps.

Jedikiah glanced up: the dampeners were clearly on, their signal lights evident. In order for any telepath to even be even remotely felt, Jedikiah had to be close.

Too close.

The Ultra man pulled his pistol from its nondescript place on his hip, senses broadening in search as he padded silently down the hall. He was suspicious of this psychic presence. The Ultra telepaths were all lunching, for one, and not nearly so blatant, for two.

Ergo, he assumed it wasn't any telepath under his command.

The closer Jedikiah got to his office, the stronger the sensation became. As he got two doors away, he had to stifle a gasp as a literal image burst across his mind's eye.

_A man's open collar, a button missing..._

Jedikiah shook his head fiercely, dislodging the imagery. Yet, there was a sensation associated with the image. The projector, whomever it was, sent a gentle feeling of warmth pooling in Jedikiah's gut.

The warmth didn't belong to Jedikiah: he could be certain as much. But the weird echo of someone else's physical status was eerie. It was a much more pleasant version of what Alexa had projected during interrogation not three hours ago.

Jedikiah moved even slower now, but he was scarcely two more steps when another, stronger image surged into his mind.

_A chin hooked over a shoulder from behind, a hand sliding hotly into a shirt from the hem, a feminine panting..._

Jedikiah suppressed an audible, "Whoa." Whoever this telepath was, they were getting freaky with someone else.

In. His. Office.

His ire returned and his eyes narrowed. Whoever it was, they were about to be rudely interrupted.

Another step, and only one door between Jedikiah and his own workspace. His grip on his pistol tightened as another sensory overload assaulted him. True lust curled in his belly, unbidden, secondhand.

_A nip along a creamy thigh, a shudder, a woman's hoarse whisper of, "Please, don't tease me..."_

Jedikiah swallowed. Hard. His cock was starting to take an interest in the surplanted thoughts. With effort, he shoved down the foreign sensations, brought his pistol back up.

With every passing second, the inverse was looking more and more attractive.

He didn't even have time to take another step: another bout of alien feelings and images shoved their way to the forefront.

_"Beg me..."_

That voice was male, but it sounded terribly familiar.

_Fingers slicked by something, plunging into a tight, hot channel..._

Christ, Jedikiah had to check his own fingers to make sure it wasn't real. His cock was already half-hard, and his neck tense with the effort of holding back. It wasn't him feeling this (if only his hammering heart would listen). It wasn't real (if only his throbbing cock would obey). His pistol wavered before him. Jedikiah had to end this, before things got seriously out of hand.

In two broad steps, he was standing in his office door, gun ready. There was no one there, but a slight movement on his couch made him jerk around.

Stern was laying across the plush leather furniture. Her eyes were closed, her body loose with repose. She was sleeping on her back, one arm behind her head and the other across her ribs. A faint furrow appeared on her brow, perfect pink lips parting slightly. Her characteristic heels were off, and even as Jedikiah watched, her toes slowly curled.

Jedikiah nearly fell to his knees as the strongest mental invasion yet swept across his mind like a torrent of heat.

_"Beg me, or I'll keep you on edge," Jedikiah said, raspy but intense with dark sincerity._

_She arched her back with a whine, jaw clenched, prideful. "Make me," she ground out, legs twitching. Stern raised her head to pin him with a snarl of defiance._

_Jedikiah slowed the pace of his fingers, barely brushed a thumb over her clit. She choked on a moan, hips twisting. "I can do this all day, Laura," he informed with sinister promise. "All. Day."_

Jedikiah came back to his own body, chest heaving, mind whirling as it fell into place. Stern was dreaming. About him. And her.

And what's more, she was projecting her dream. It only confirmed his suspicions. Jedikiah realized it had to be because her watch had broken: it must have enabled her to hide her species for so long. Now without her dampener to wear, and in the wake of the mental attack from Alexa's interrogation, Stern was leaking like a faucet all over Jedikiah's brain.

And possibly, if his secondhand lust was any indication, all over his couch.

If it hadn't been him walking down this hall, undoubtedly someone else would have intercepted her dreams. Jedikiah was a fortunate man.

As he watched her quizzically over his gun sights, debating if he wanted to ruin his couch with her blood, it occurred to Jedikiah he'd wanted her increasingly since she first crossed his carpet. He'd eyed her from a professional distance as she won battle after battle, took his cruelty on the chin, fought back with her spunk and spite and unpretentiously beautiful body. It flummoxed him, how she thrived in such a harsh place like a plant poking through concrete.

All his prods and harassment towards her had been in test of that tenacious spirit.

Jedikiah flipped the safety back onto his gun, holstered it. He had a decision to make: enact his anger on Stern for her lie by railing against her, firing her, kicking her out on her pretty ass; pretend he wasn't hard and wanting because of her (yet again, he realized). He could make a call to the Founder and get permission to depower her, and he'd have the satisfaction of watching all that made her so damned excellent burn away from her chromosomes like witchfire.

Or Jedikiah could walk away, delay the flagellation, and find a quiet bathroom stall to take care of his pressing urge.

A devious grin flicked over Jedikiah's face. What kind of Ultra top dog would he be if he couldn't compromise the two endeavors?

A soft huff escaped Stern's lips as her hand slid just a hair's breadth lower to her waist, unconsciously spurred by the dream's sensations. An imageless stab of pure lust spiked Jedikiah's blood at the implication. Nope, that one was all him.

He made no sound as he crossed the floor, rounded the low table. Just as he crouched next to the sleeping woman, another flash of stolen dreams flitted into his mind.

_"Please," Stern whimpered, fighting his grip that kept her wrists pinned above her head on the desk. She finally raised her head to give him a wrecked expression, all bitten lips and tossed hair and desperation. She was coming apart under his onslaught, quickening to the motions of his fingers, tightening. "Please, Jedikiah, please pleasepleaseplease - "_

Jedikiah moaned before he could stop himself, low and guttural. She was seconds away from going off like a bomb...

Laura Stern's eyes fluttered open. Confusion colored them hazy, then frustration as the orgasm flickered in her body.

"Hello, Stern," Jedikiah greeted huskily. "Pleasant dreams?"

Her eyes widened in realization, then terror. As she opened her mouth, Jedikiah pounced.

He grasped both of her wrists, quickly pinned them at the level of her head. She cried out in surprise and fear, but Jedikiah thrust his face close to hers. "Not. One. Word," he hissed.

Stern fought his hold. The semblance to the dream of mere seconds ago was enough to send another flame of heat licking into her belly.

Jedikiah grinned like the devil. "I can feel you, Stern," he whispered in her ear. "So close, aren't you?"

The woman made an angry sound as she gave up struggling against his tight grip. "Fuck you, Price!" she spat. "Human Resources will be getting a lengthy sexual harassment report tomorrow, starring you!"

"Do Homo Superiors get HR?" he rejoined coolly.

"Let me go this instant!"

"I don't think I will," he replied with infuriating calm. "I want to hear you admit what you've hidden from me for all these months."

"Like hell," she growled, eyes blazing. Her skirt was too narrow to bring up a knee to hit him, and from the current angle both knees would be ineffective.

"Come now, Stern," he purred, the innuendo a torment to both of them. "There's nobody else around to hear you."

The room was quiet save for two sets of heavy breathing, the click of Stern's nervous swallow.

"I know one way to make you show your true colors," Jedikiah said, as conversational as he was during interrogations. He transferred her wrists to one hand, and used the free hand to grasp her chin securely, forcing her to look into his sharp eyes. "If I can feel you," he said. "Then you can feel me."

Jedikiah grabbed at the tail of his lust and _yanked_. It spiraled in his gut with heat like a supernova, boiling his blood. Stern's mouth thinned as she bit back some sound, pulling fruitlessly on her hands. With the addition of his touch, the psychic link was almost constant, fuzzing out only as much as a dish in a hailstorm. It was maddening, to feel his lust and try to stomp out her own. "No," she gritted out.

"No, what?" managed Jedikiah. He was compounding her flagging desire, without even touching her. That just made him ache more in his pants.

Stern thrashed her head, her face drawn between exquisite need and stubborn anger, refusing to answer.

Jedikiah redoubled his efforts, replaying some of the imagery she'd inadvertently graced him with. _Fingers sliding torturously..._

A whimper crossed her lips. "Stop it," she whispered. "Stop that."

"Then say it," urged Jedikiah. He had the boldness and burn to seize her ear in his teeth, biting none too gently.

The effect was immediate: a return thrice-over of the lust he'd shoved at her. Stern gasped and her hips bucked once, knees brushing Jedikiah's back with a threatless convulsion. She tensed off the couch as far as she could towards him, getting in his face to snarl with furious arousal, "I'm a Homo Superior!"

Jedikiah pressed her back down, his breath taken momentarily. Even in the middle of this twisted game he enacted on her mind and body, to see Laura Stern so passionate, so fiery, lit a blaze in Jedikiah's bitter and angry heart that rivaled that in his gut. He'd broken through.

"There," he said, releasing her chin. "Was that so hard?"

"You got what you want," she said, cheeks blazing, turning her head towards the sofa. "Let me go."

Jedikiah's mean streak rose. "I haven't gotten nearly what I want from you, Stern."

Stern turned back to eye him warily, her gaze still heated with arousal and spitfire.

"I wonder," Jedikiah continued, his dark gaze wandering the strained buttons of her blouse, the outline of the demicup lingerie beneath. "What the Founder would do if he discovered what you are?"

Stern went pale as a ghost.

"Oh, so he doesn't know," Jedikiah smirked with mocking reproval.

"Nobody does," she said. All the tension had drained from her body, and left defeated laxness in its wake. "I wear the dampener so nobody..."

Jedikiah's recalcitrance grew in him, and he tightened his grip on her wrists painfully. He would not be dissuaded by her sudden deflation. "I have a proposition for you, Stern," he said, meeting the renewed fight in her gaze. "It might just save your life, because the one person who hates to be deceived more than me is the Founder."

She was clearly biting back expletives, fixing hateful eyes on him expectantly.

"In recompense for your lies, you will continue to work here, under me," he began. "And you will take whatever punishment I deem... fitting." He ran a single finger across the outline of one bra cup through her shirt, and watched her expression for comprehension.

Stern practically choked, her face a contortion of rage, and she sputtered, "And if I refuse?"

Jedikiah reached into his pocket, withdrew his cellphone, and held up a speed dial number. "One call, and you're powerless, dead, or both." He put the phone back in his pocket and grinned lewdly. "I think we both know that you aren't entirely opposed to the idea."

Stern looked up at the ceiling, a derisive snort leaving her perfect lips. "Blackmail," she said darkly. "Sex for safety. Does that about sum it up?"

"In essence," Jedikiah replied evenly, watching her with a cool blue gaze. "You're qualified to write the form for it."'

Despite all, the corner of her mouth tipped up for a blink before returning to utter solemnity. She stared into his eyes unflinchingly, daringly, with twin jasper fires. Those fires sought to burn him down to his true motives.

"My intention," Jedikiah stated after a long moment. "Is to solicit various sexual favors from you, in exchange for keeping your secret. In addition..." he trailed off with a dangerous smile. Jedikiah fished around in his head for a moment for a particular thread of thought, and when he shoved it at her, she sucked a ragged breath.

It was one of his own, personal fantasies. He gave it reign when he was home alone in the evenings, pensive and reproachful that he couldn't leave thoughts of her at work.

_His stiff hand fell against her bare ass, the SMACK reverberating._

_She yelped, flexing on his lap futilely, and the sound turned to a low moan of pain and pleasure mixed thornily._

_More spanks rained, covering both ass cheeks, down the backs of her thighs. He took special delight in the soft underside of her bottom, spending more stinging attention on it than elsewhere, until she was screaming, head down, writhing across his legs wantonly. He painted her red from below kidneys to above knees._

_"You brought this on yourself," he said silkily, pausing to run a hand over his fevered work, relishing her hiss and buck. "You know what those fuck-me heels do to me..."_

"In addition," Jedikiah repeated as he broke the fantasy pitilessly, cleaving to the way she echoed the hiss from his sordid reverie. "I'm choosing to punish you for your lying, Stern. Until your temp term is up, or I feel you've paid the price."

"You mean, paid the Price," she sneered, turning the noun to pronoun distastefully.

Jedikiah actually chuckled at her quick-wittedness, even under the circumstances.

"I hate you," she growled, the flames of the Hell he was doomed to in her eyes. "I accept your terms, but I will never stop hating you."

Jedikiah smiled, wicked and unrepentant. "I do hope so."

"Let me up, already," she said haughtily. "My hands are asleep."

"So push me off," he challenged, eyes narrowing. "Come on, Homo Superior, show your stripes."

"You still haven't put two and two together, have you?" She was no longer tugging on his grip, though he'd maintained it to the point she'd most likely entertain bruises. There was a calculating look on her face that usually proved perilous to inadequately reviewed agents. When directed at Jedikiah, it only served to annoy: a pretense of commandeering that he sought to rob her of.

"Care to clue me in?" he snapped. Jedikiah's inner evolutionary biologist started to carve on a chalkboard, adding up the evidence.

"Why would I, a Homo Superior, need a dampener on my very person just to escape notice?" she asked rhetorically.

"To avoid other telepaths picking up on you," answered Jedikiah. He was missing something.

"Why?" she asked again, lips curling wickedly. "The dampeners render them inert within Ultra walls. Why do the in-house dampeners not work on me?"

Was Stern saying she was strong enough to broadcast naughty dreams over the office dampeners? "You're stronger than them," he concluded. Jedikiah's inner biologist was still scratching away at the chalkboard...

"And what might make me so?"

The pieces clicked into place. There was only one explanation for this happenstance. "That's why I'm not TK'd into a wall right now," Jedkiah said slowly. "Or why you've not teleported away. You can't do either." His disbelief caused him to lean into her face again, blue eyes slicing. "You can't do either?!"

"Nope," she replied, popping the 'p' infuriatingly. "Instead of getting a dose of each of the three T's," she whispered with gentle menace. "I got a triple dose of just... one."

It made complete sense, and his inner scientist reveled in the discovery. Deep, deep down, however, Jedikiah stymied a flicker of worry. What was he getting himself into with this little bargain?

"I may be at your mercy to save my own skin," she continued, the sultry promise of threat in her tone. "But I am in no way helpless. We will play this game of punishment as my clock runs out, but remember... if I'm strong enough without my dampener to accidentally broadcast my dreams, imagine what I can do when I want to hurt. What you put Alexa through down in interrogation will look like a fucking cakewalk compared to what I can do."

Jedikiah met her eyes steadily, pulse throbbing with liquid need. "There's the Stern I know," he replied with delicate jeer. "I was wondering when she'd come back." This was going to be the challenge he'd always imagined, wished for in his very core. To dominate. To conquer. To break this living statue of a woman that haunted him. To sink his teeth into her.

This was going to be fun.

"Then I suppose," Jedikiah proclaimed, surreptitiously gathering his feet under him while leaning perilously close to Stern. "There's only one thing left to do."

She eyed him like a rattlesnake watching a cobra for a strike. "What's that?"

"Seal the deal," he smirked. And he struck.

Jerking her off the couch in one swift motion, he gathered her against his chest. Ignoring her low but indignant squawks, he bundled her towards his desk and made to push her down upon it.

 _NO!_ her mental voice speared through his brain like a butcher knife. "I will not be taken like a whore, Price!"

"So you acquiesce to being taken, then?" he jeered, loosing her long enough to shove her to the flat, gleaming surface.

She caught herself on her arms and looked back over her shoulder furiously. "You can't expect - "

"I can," he interrupted. "And I do." He crowded her from behind, hard in his pants and letting it be known. "Take your pick of pertinent options, Stern," he said, running an impatient, heavy hand down her back.

Stern was wide eyed, bewildered. She was still pulsing and needy from the near-orgasm of her dream, which both amazed and flustered her. It hadn't helped to have the object of said dream hold her down in humiliation and throw gasoline on her fires. But she recognized an opportunity for a creative solution when she saw one. Even as her mind betrayed her traitorous body to him, causing that maddening smile to grace his indolent lips, she plotted to turn his words against him.

When she bumped her ass to his stomach, there was only perfunctory sexuality to it. The motion did what she desired: it pushed him back far enough for her to hitch her skirt up and swing a knee onto the desk.

By the time he'd regained his balance, she was kneeled on the surface of his desk: perfect ass prominent, skirt hiked, and flexible hips on display.

Stern was no fool. She could understand the rules of the game, and read Jedikiah's lust-addled mind, besides. She knew what he wanted (his dominance, her submission), and designed to turn it against him.

This time, when she regarded him over her shoulder, it was with a sultry, animal heat that came from her very loins. With a quick dip into his mind, she saw what he saw and felt secondhand the effect it was having. His pants were uncomfortably tight, and his pulse pounded. But he was transfixed by the power of what she proposed in this position: the possibilities rattling through his brain like ticker tape.

Right where she wanted him.

Just to fuck with him, she ran her hands slowly down her own sides, down her thighs, and lethargically spread her knees until her hot core was practically flat to the desk. _Imagine being inside me, like this,_ she murmured to his psyche. _How tight I would be. How I would grip you all over. Milk you soft and empty._

Jedikiah flinched behind her, cock twitching sharply. "Fuck, Stern," he growled vehemently.

Her mental presence was snatched away, and the conjurings along with it. "I'm not letting you inside me until I'm sure you're clean," she stated evenly, fully intending to throw him. Tossing her hair over one shoulder, she queried sweetly, "Will that be a problem?"

Her goad snapped the man out of his rooted state, and he closed the gap in a half-step. "I was going to say the same thing," he sneered, reaching around her front to roughly unbutton her blouse.

Stern swallowed at the brush of his fingers. "You must really hate me if you're willing to go to all this trouble." Her antagonism fell shorter than she'd have liked due to the shiver that ran through her.

Jedikiah finished his task and bared her nude-toned lace to his hungry gaze. "Don't flatter yourself," he snorted. He pushed the blouse down her shoulders, and the taut muscle over her collarbone begged for his teeth. He obliged, palming her cups roughly and reveling in her bitten-back noises. "I'm not letting you go until you come," he threatened. His other hand ran over her (firm, supple, delicious) ass, slipping under her skirt and between stretch-pinioned legs to find her panties.

The heat and moisture there nearly made him lose it on the spot.

Stern threw back her head almost violently at his touch, reaching back to grip a firm handful of his pants leg, as though she required something to ground her. He stroked her through the lace, teasing.

"I hope you can do it before the lunch crowd lets out," Jedikiah whispered.

Her gasp of outrage turned to a moan of pleasure as he plunged beneath the panties, impaling her on a thick, clever finger.

Stern's locked body belied her reluctance to give into his demands, and it beckoned his free hand to pinch her sides, pluck her nipples through the demicup. He mouthed along her tense neck, strumming at a corded tendon with amusement. It might disappoint him to keep all her clothes on, but it positively killed her. This was asserting his status, pure and simple. He would remain clothed, and she would be exposed like a harlot to whomever ventured past the office door.

He knew, somehow, that half-clothed was more humiliating to her than being naked. As though she wasn't worth the effort.

After only a minute, Stern's evolutionary imperative began to usurp her will. She had been unwillingly clenching down on his vexatiously moving finger from the moment of entry, but now, her hips began to move in time to his penetrations: little unsatisfying nudges of her pelvis that hinted at growing desire.

Jedikiah focused on sucking a mark over her scapula, where her bra strap would irritate it, and without warning added a second digit.

Stern choked on a whine and started to move in earnest, mouth open with rasps of breath. Jedikiah found his free hand drawn to her bunching stomach, tracing the slight compartments of muscle there.

"Beg me," he commanded, hooking his chin over to watch her move from the front, to enjoy the cant of her hips in answer of his every thrust. "Beg me, or I'll keep you on edge."

Stern's back bowed with a strangled groan as Jedikiah, the heartless bastard, nailed the dark tenor of his dream self's order.

She was so there, so close! Dream and reality swirled potently in her brain, lit up her body, coiled her pleasure deep and thorny. Their minds were so tangent, and with every second overlapped incrementally more until their pleasures were indistinguishable. All she needed was a little more...

"I can do this all day, Laura," he promised sinisterly in her ear. "All. Day."

Stern climaxed like a nuclear bomb, white hot candy sweet pleasure imploding her, obliterating her. She tightened like a vice and roared like a lioness into Jedikiah's hand, which clapped over her mouth.

Jedikiah let her ride his hand, and her mental reverberations drove him to his own orgasm, untouched and fully clothed. If he wasn't so impressed at the occurrence, he would have been more upset.

By the time she resurfaced from the typhoon, he'd recovered himself and withdrawn his juice-sodden hand. Stepping back left her bereft, severed their psionic tangencies. Stern sagged as his heat left her back, panting, closing her blouse with lacking motivation. The sudden silence was deafening as he watched her pliant back, adjusting his disagreeable clothes.

The tone of the hour chimed over the building, signaling the end of lunch.

"No one will think twice about us taking the rest of the day, after what happened in interrogation" he said quietly, breaking the stillness. "Go home. I'm doing the same."

Stern seemed to reel herself back to earth, and slid off the desk with barely a grunt of overflexed pain. "Until I fix my dampener, I can't come in," she said, finishing the buttons and turning. Her cheeks were still rosy, her lips a deeper pink than before. "The telepaths will sense me, without it."

Jedikiah could sense it more clearly, now. Even with fading arousal tingeing the edges, the surges of her mind were practically elemental, washing over his inner skull with the flare of radiating sunspots. "How long will that take?"

"A day, maybe two at most." She wasn't looking at him, tucking in her shirttail with a poker face negated by an off voice.

"Here," Jedikiah took the broken watch from his pocket and handed it back to her. Something poked under his ribs when she carefully didn't touch him in the exchange.

"Telecommute," he permitted. He could hear the sounds of employees clomping up the stairs down the hall. "Get going."

Stern hastily gathered her mobile office, slipped into her heels by the couch. Her strides out of the office were quick with worry about being caught psychically naked, and slightly languid with post-orgasm wobble.

Jedikiah watched her go, wondering why he was so unhappy when he'd gotten what he wanted.


	6. Chapter 6

Jedikiah came in the next day feeling refreshed in body and mind from the rest, but the damnably empty desk of his conniving secretary continued to draw his eye. It pissed him off more with every passing minute, to the point where he flung down his pen and sauntered out to find suitably managerial distraction.

Watching a trainee named Hilary fling Stephen into the ceiling with TK was undeniably funny to Jedikiah, but he hid the humor under a guise of longsuffering disappointment. He gave the trainees a challenge in teamwork, and sat back to watch the backbiting.

He puts some agents on the tail of a group of Tomorrow People who were breaking into highrise apartments to steal and terrorize, but his heart wasn't in it.

Swiveling his chair around to watch the city peaks gleam and traffic surge allowed him room to meditate. Jedikiah was pleased, in a sense. He had Laura Stern right where he wanted her: subjugated to his will, somewhat compliant, and spitting angry fit to raise his fires to unholy levels.

So why wasn't he reveling?

Boo-doomp! chirped his interoffice IM. Jedikiah rolled his chair back to the desk, cracking his neck. It was probably medical demanding his reports.

Are you there, Mr. Price?

Jedikiah wasn't positive who this might be. The tag said Reprimand. Jedikiah frowned in consternation, and at the overt, nerdy code-name-esque nature of the tag. His own was a much more demure UltraJPrice.

Sam, Jedikiah typed, referring to the southern IT guy. Is that you? The backwoods geek had taken it upon himself to chat Jedikiah up every time he saw the blonde man, with a familiarity that unnerved Jedikiah.

Do you mean Samuel, from IT? No, I'm not him. It's ME, Price.

Jedikiah pinched the bridge of his nose and loosed a heartfelt sigh. Stern. Of course. Stern Reprimand. To assure me, tell me where our last encounter was.

He could practically feel her seething. On the fucking desk, you asshole. And before that, if you were counting, on the couch.

Language! he patronized.

As I've said before, fuck you, Price.

Why the furtivity, Reprimand? he typed with a chortle.

I'm hacked onto the interoffice IM, that's why. I shouldn't be on here if I'm outside the building.

Why have you spun your IM tag into a deviant BDSM pseudonym?

A pause of about ten seconds. Maybe I'm into that sort of thing. You would never know.

It was Jedikiah's turn to pause. Are you?

A longer pause, about thirty seconds. Sorry, I had to finish oiling my flogger. I named it the Attitude Adjuster. Would you care to meet it?

It would prove who the real deviant is, he replied, emboldened.

I'm not the one fantasizing about spanking me.

Point one for the Homo Superior. What's this about, Reprimand?

I've typed up a contract outlining some basic aspects of this fuckery we call an arrangement. And I swear to God, if I hear one comment about Fifty Shades of Grey, I will make you bleed from the ears.

Smutty novels are more your forte` than mine, he replied snidely. They were both committed to this arrangement: he for the power trip, she for her secret's sake. The sex was the vehicle and a bonus, in Jedikiah's opinion. The contract was only smart, for both of them. Jedikiah liked the whole idea. It kept him on the razor's edge of consent (which meant more work, but more payoff in twisting her reluctance into screaming pleasure). It would provide a framework for, as Stern called it, the arrangement, and enable them both to mind boundaries. It might be a stretch to call it legally binding, seeing as it was blackmail of a paranormal being by the head of a paragovernmental organization, but for their own morals and ethics, it would prove useful.

Well, if one could call the scraps of humanity Jedikiah possessed as morals and ethics. Again, that was more Stern's forte`.

Again, you would never know if they were.

Jedikiah's eyes flickered over her words with a sense of resigned assent. Stern was completely right. He would never know the first thing about her unless she chose to reveal it, species notwithstanding. He'd had to sexually back her against a wall to get even that most basic information. The real question was if it would work again...

Don't send it here...

Wasn't planning to.

...Where can we meet to go over it?

Don't say a location over this IM. Who knows what might fall into the wrong hands.

You could just *contact* me.

A few seconds passed before she replied. Let me think of a place first.

There was a long pause. Jedikiah waited with baited breath, wondering how far away she was, if she retained psychic strength with that distance, if within that distance she could still breach the walls of Ultra. Variables rolled around in his head. The tickle across his brain made him jump slightly, and he held onto it like an outstretched hand. It clasped him back.

He could feel Stern, like a hawk high above, streaking through the sky towards him. Stern fell across space to land in his mind, folding her wings, talons sinking into but not harming their human perch. Her sharp eye peered at him with the neutrality of nature, the passively violent instinct of evolution.

_Hello. It's just me._

"Who else would it be?" Jedikiah said aloud, a slight smile tipping his mouth.

He could feel her fight her own grin, preening at the feat she knew was remarkable. _I have need of something from you._

"What might that be?" he drawled, plumbing the innuendo for all it was worth. "Another desk session?"

Stern derisively snorted through their link, pointedly ignoring him save for the sensation of an embarrassed flush. _My dampener watch can't be repaired until I replace some parts. I need you to bring me a dampener device so I can butcher it._

Jedikiah was already thinking through the minor form he'd have to fill out, and where the dampeners were stored in the building. "Consider it done. Where would you have us meet?"

He could sense her chewing her inner cheek in consternation. _See, that's the thing. I live out in the country, away from people who might feel my psychic presence's escaping rays. As you've witnessed, without my watch I'm exposed to my power's outbursts, particularly when I sleep._

Jedikiah could definitely, explicitly remember. A few snapshot memories skittered across his mind's eye (fingers-gasps-wetness), but he shoved them down in favor of the conversation. He could always revisit them when his mind was his own again.

 _That said, I can't leave my home until I have my watch back. So you'll have to come to me._ If Stern were before him, she'd undoubtedly be wearing a distasteful wrinkle in her nose. She managed to pass the general idea along cohesively.

Jedikiah mulled it over, acutely aware of the telepath passively watching his thoughts like a tablet screen. He didn't mind the idea of seeing Stern again, much less in her vulnerable state. And he'd be able to sink his claws into her again, much to their mutual enjoyment.

Don't bet on it, Stern retorted blandly, but he got the fleeting impression she'd crossed her legs a little tighter.

"When and where?" Jedikiah replied. In response he received a mental fast-motion route summary, presumably of her drive home, which focused on the street signs that would guide his way. Jedikiah made easy note of each one, surprised to find he'd driven past the house a few times this year.

It was about twenty miles away. Twenty miles! Ultra's best telepaths couldn't cross that distance without the aid of a spinal port!

 _Clearly, whenever you can make it out would be fine. But keep in mind, I can't return to work until I fix my watch. And also, I will eventually run out of food._ A 1/16th second flash of a bar of chocolate flitted through their bond, but she reeled back on the bleed-over craving.

"Trust me," Jedikiah smirked into his empty office. "I want you back here. It's simply no fun without you."

Her swallow was brought on by a sudden, buzzing, carnal heat tempered with trepidation, and was so palpable through the mental link, Jedikiah felt the urge to imitate it. _I'll see you this evening, then._

The withdrawal of her mind from his left him with the feeling of having been psionically stretched, then shrinking back down to normal size. Jedikiah steepled his fingers for a long minute, collecting his thoughts. His inner scientist exulted in the new data from the clearly unique being under his thumb.

He would have to twist Stern's arm into letting him test her capacity in more ways than just one, apparently. Who knew how an intimate understanding of her special power might benefit Ultra?

In addition to the form for the spare dampeners (he'd bring a few, better safe than sorry), he also requisitioned a full lab kit and a few specialized tools from the research lab. With any luck, he'd have Stern exploitably bent over a barrel, figuratively and literally, in less than six hours.

***

"Excuse me, Doctor Price, sir?" a sycophantic voice a the clack of low heels brought Jedikiah out of his tablet, but didn't slow his walk down an Ultra hall. He spared a look over his shoulder to match the voice to Hilary, the barely-woman who had been nagging him about Stephen. Jedikiah had to admit the blonde trainee may have brought to mind a yapping chihuahua, but she acted like a champion fighting pitbull: when she set her teeth in something, it was all over.

This time, however, the Ultra man found it annoying. Jedikiah was having trouble tracking down a mobile EEG, which would enable him to measure Stern's brain activity (once he blackmailed her into submission, anyway). He allowed the blonde to trot after him, and did not give a reply.

"I just wanted to follow up with you about your nephew's human confidant, Miss Finch?" continued Hilary, having some trouble keeping up with Jedikiah's long stride.

"Yes, I have the situation under control," Jedikiah replied absently, sending the final search request to the medical ward.

"And Stephen will be reprimanded the same as everyone else, right?" Hilary continued pointedly. The hate-on she carried for Stephen was starting to make Jedikiah grind his teeth.

In addition, she used the word 'reprimand', which now had decidedly more salacious connotations in Jedikiah's mind. He wouldn't have that ruined by the word leaving unworthy lips.

"I don't answer to you, Miss Cole," Jedikiah reminded in a way that usually shut people down. Oh, but she was such a good little mole; such a dedicated soldier to the cause. Jedikiah couldn't smother her fires. Swiping the tablet closed, he continued, "And your strong work ethic is to be commended."

Hilary gave a knowing beam, acknowledging her own excellence.

Jedikiah fixed stone cold blue eyes on the girl. "But internal sabotage based on ruthless ambition and personal vendetta will not be tolerated."

"Yes, but - the girl, you're going to kill her?" pushed the trainee.

Jedikiah was reaching the end of his patience for this chihuahua's yapping. "If I say 'yes' and you smile, you're next," he threatened. He paused to let Hilary school her face to neutrality. "Yes. But I want you to understand something. You and everyone like you have the privilege of working at this agency for the exclusive benefit of human beings. And when one of them has to be sacrificed for the greater good it is not a cause for celebration or personal achievement, ya got it?" Jedikiah growled.

The full weight of his flinty tone fell on her still-tender shoulders, and Hilary replied in a subdued tone, "Yes, sir."

Jedikiah turned away, holding her gaze forcefully until the last second. Even a pitbull stood no chance against a lion, king of his world. "Nice talk."

A few turns in the large building later, his tablet indicated a message from medical: they were in possession of the mobile EEG. Jedikiah swiftly descended upon the ward and snatched up the device. Once the narrow briefcase was under his arm, he felt considerably less annoyed. As the time for his departure drew nearer, he grew more excited.

Sex, science, and Stern, all rolled into one. Jedikiah had no doubt he'd be getting all three. His evening was looking brighter by the second.

***

"Well, fuck," Jedikiah bit out, peering through the blanket of water that fell onto his windshield. For a clear substance, the rain was rather impenetrable by the human eye. Thunder sounded loudly in the heavens, literally rattling Jedikiah's leg against the car door like radio bass.

It had been raining discernible droplets when he got out of the office, and had gotten progressively worse as he drove. Now, he fairly inched his way down the road, leaving the city behind in favor of suburbs and strip malls.

At least there were no other cars around. Everyone else had the sense to stay indoors.

For the third time, the radio informed Jedikiah of the potential of severe thunderstorms, hail, and the tornado touchdown three counties over. He stabbed the button to silence the monotone voice, gripped the wheel tighter, and rolled on.

Soon his perseverance paid off. The strip malls and look-alike houses gave way to woods, fields, and the occasional older-model house that stood from the hands of two or more generations' care. The trees whipped the sky into a frenzy, and a few times Jedikiah had to inch around fallen limbs.

 _Are you alright?_ asked Stern, suddenly breaking his concentration and filling his head like an explosion.

Jedikiah jumped, but righted the vehicle. "A little warning, Stern!" he barked.

The Homo Superior read the situation as it presented itself through his eyes and said, _I apologize. Is it too dangerous for you to be out in this storm?_

Jedikiah _psshed_ in offhanded negative. "More tedious than anything. Besides, I'm closer to coming than going." He boldly grinned, lightning flashing in agreement. "So to speak."

 _You are such a dog,_ Stern replied, giving the impression of shaking her head. _Would you like a little help seeing?_

They fell back into their problem-solving roles with ease, for all the world acting like they were ironing out the kinks in a presentation. "What do you suggest?" Jedikiah asked.

He felt Stern push and rummage a little then, inside his skull. Like she'd placed a firm fingertip upon a specific portion of his brain. _If I may..._

With a momentarily sickening tilt and surge, the world as Jedikiah saw it gave way. He blinked. Rubbed his eyes, blinked harder. "My, my, Miss Stern," he said, impressed. "You've been holding out on me."

The rain still fell, but to Jedikiah's Stern-warped reality, it didn't obscure his car's windshield. In fact, outside the car was bright as day. The droplets plummeted from a robin's egg blue sky like a bizarre meteorological event, but they made no discernible impact on the ground, car, or trees.

Jedikiah was forcibly reminded of just how powerful the single-T Homo Superior was. He resolved to learn as much as he could about her, and her unique genetic code.

 _You're seeing what I usually see on my drive home,_ Stern explained absently, unaware of his musings as she 'fiddled with the dials'. _It's very real. You can..._ She trailed off.

Jedikiah stepped on the accelerator and prompted, "I can what?"

_I was going to say, 'You can trust me,' but in all honesty, I don't think you would._

Jedikiah's brow knitted, and he was distracted from the strange controversy of weather by the implications of her words. "I can trust you," he corrected, the shriveled thing in his ribcage agreeing with a squeeze. Despite her being of a different species that he viewed as malignant, and despite the nefarious hold he had over her, Jedikiah had spent the better part of four months working alongside Laura Stern. He wasn't sure exactly when it happened, but he'd placed some trust in the secretary. He cleared his throat and revised, "I'm carrying something you need. You have every reason to ensure my safe arrival."

Were she riding beside him, she might have hummed passively, as though she only partly agreed with him. Nonetheless, the sentiment was silently communicated through their bond.

"Besides," Jedikiah continued, a cat-like grin sliding into place. "I can't make you climax multiple times from a car."

The daytime rain imagery faltered for a few seconds like a skipping record. Her mental splutter and the carry-over of her physical choke on some drink was enough to make Jedikiah chuckle. _Come again?!_ she managed.

"You will," he replied serenely. "And again, and again, and again..."

 _Fuck you, Price!_ Stern replied hotly, her emotions of mild arousal and fury at war. The idea had enough merit that she was trying desperately to hide it.

That brought a genuine laugh to Jedikiah's lips. "It's conditional, of course."

Wariness was clear. _How so?_

"I want to do a few tests on your powers," Jedikiah explained carefully. "You're incredibly unique, Stern. Understanding you might be useful to Ultra, to the human race."

Intrigue bled through the link, and a smattering of more arousal, but it was clear she was hiding a lot of her thoughts on the matter. It felt like he was looking through a keyhole into the room of her vast mind, and only seeing enough of the workings to whet his appetite.

"Medical kink much, Stern?" teased Jedikiah, shifting in his seat as his own body responded to her sexual echo.

It might have been hard to mentally grumble under one's breath, but the secretary managed. _And the STD panel I asked for?_

"I can run it for both of us while you watch. I imagine that would make you feel better, to see it happen?" He'd thought it through, and decided demonstrating credibility and agreeability for Stern's (reasonable) demands was conducive to their arrangement. It could only work in his favor.

The blackmailing was inescapable. Being an asshole, less so.

There was a blank pause through which no emotion escaped, like a firewall between condominiums. Jedikiah could sense her, but he couldn't feel her, and found that he really wanted to, at that moment. Finally, she spoke, _It seems I'm not the only trustworthy one in this arrangement._

He smiled. "I'll see you soon, Stern."


	7. Chapter 7

The rain stopped amid a sickly yellow-green sky that promised a resurgence. Jedikiah hefted the bag and briefcase from his trunk and bolted for the front door of the inconspicuous brick ranch house. It was just as old as the ones he had passed en route, but Stern's house had a few modern touches: the font of the house numbers was Courier New; the shutters were the same trendy teal as the Prius parked under the carport; the landscaping was well cared for.

A sharp gust of wind blew wet leaves from the spreading, sheltering oak into his face, and it gave him a grunting pause as he wristed his eyes clean. He heard rather than saw the internal door open, and the glass outer door settle into its frame at the suction. As his vision cleared, his mind clouded.

Stern in casual wear was a conundrum of epic proportions. The image of her in sorority sweatpants, a Plain White Tees hoodie, and tastefully mismatched socks was such a clash with what he usually saw, and what his mental stock of her was, that he found himself momentarily mute. Stern sans makeup wasn't much different, all deep pink lips and long lashes working to make him swallow a tad harder.

Still, was this even the same woman?

From the other side of the glass storm door, the secretary cocked her ponytailed head. "Come in, dumbass. Storm's about to start up again."

Jedikiah smirked. Yep, same woman. She stepped back as he shifted his load to open the door. As it swung wide, the scent of cinnamon and baking assaulted him. "Did you make cookies for me?" mocked the blonde, setting down the briefcase to bolt the door behind him.

He was expecting a sneer and a retort punctuated by their mental equivalent. Instead Stern remained unflapped, driving home her boss's suspicion that she was white-knuckling her mind's radiating pulses after their little car conversation. In addition, they weren't making steady eye (and skin) contact, so all emotional factors remaining constant, the connection would be shallow at best. "When I'm anxious, I bake. 'S a bad habit." She glanced down his body, much to Jedikiah's interest, but pointedly stared at his shoes. "Off, please."

Jedikiah was reminded by the simple authority in her voice that this was her abode. It was so different from the hardwon power of her workplace persona. Here, she was queen.

Didn't mean he wouldn't test his boundaries, see what made her snippy. It was a favorite pastime, after all.

He felt momentarily guilty for the jeer that had fallen flat, so he toed off the black dress shoes without argument. "'Bad habit?' That's yet to be seen." Ambling down the short entry hall, he followed his nose through the living room with its arrangement of comfortably worn, moderately expensive furniture and white-on-green tones palette. The kitchen opened up in a wonder of stainless steel, reddish woods, and granite that, were he one to care, he would appreciate.

"Roll up a sleeve, Stern, and we'll get started," Jedikiah said, dropping the bag and case on the table and continuing to the stovetop, where two trays of cookies sat on wire racks.

His au natural employee eyed the load warily. "What's in the case?"

"I told you about the testing," Jedikiah reminded, snagging a spatula from the jar of implements. "I'd like to get a baseline for your powers. This will show me the levels of brain activity you enact when you stretch your mind, so to speak."

She leaned a hip against the doorframe between rooms, arms crossed loosely as she watched him take a cookie from the tray. "You seem excited about that," she commented blandly. "I thought Homo Superiors were a threat to Homo Sapiens, in your eyes."

Jedikiah paused in midchew. Inadvertently, Stern had put her finger on what had been nagging him for two days: how single-T paranormals challenged his viewpoint of Darwinism in action. Was someone like Stern acceptable, even reconcilable to the human race? How did she and potentially others fit into the scheme of the species on the planet, as Jedikiah (an absolute authority on the matter) saw it?

Could they do what their sister triple-T race couldn't: take lives?

The tests would help him figure that out. Seeing the teeth and claws of this variant on a theme would be the first step towards reaching a verdict. 

"You're not a Homo Superior," he muttered. Indeed, she was another classification entirely. "These are remarkably edible," he continued. Soft, chewy, and high-grade cinnamon. The raisins tasted rum-soaked. Certainly not from a plastic package.

"Gee, thanks," Stern replied, but without significant sarcasm. Outside, the rain picked up with a growing sigh, whooshing against the windowpanes as though flung. "I'm sorry, you said to roll up a sleeve...?"

"Yep," Jedikiah said. "I'm taking blood to run the STD panel and a few other tests on." He looked over at her teasingly. "Don't tell me you're afraid of needles."

"No!" she said, voice pitching an octave in indication of otherwise.

The Ultra man finished the cookie and went to wash his hands at the sink with absurdly sweet-smelling soap. "Good. The sooner we get that handled, the sooner the real fun can start."

Stern snorted balefully. "If you call sexual coercion fun, sure."

Jedikiah faced her, a handy towel at use and a wolfish grin in place. "You don't?"

A faint blush rose to her cheeks and she dropped his gaze. "I'm not sure what to call it."

That concerned him, on some obscure level. Jedikiah was under the impression that sexual blackmailers did not bother themselves with the emotional compliance of their victims, so much as they did their physical willingness. But this was not an ordinary blackmailing, and both Jedikiah and Stern knew it. He had secretly desired Stern almost as soon as she'd stepped foot in the office, and built their relationship around the clear repression of that desire. It was the fact he could sense the same in Stern, in her antagonism and lack of contrition, that skewed the color of the arrangement into something decidedly... complicated.

Putting aside the towel, Jedikiah measured the space in paced steps and captured Stern's chin, forcing her to look at him with those snapping eyes. He noticed for the very first time that they were very green, not the sea green he had thought, like the pine boughs that bent in the gale outside. "Well," he breathed, inches from her lips. "We'll have to work on that."

Their proximity reminded each, in varyingly poignant ways, that they had yet to kiss. But then, that was what lovers did. And they were far from lovers.

He gave her time to respond with a dilation of the pupils, an infinitesimal drift towards him, before pulling away and walking to the table. "Best use of our time," he began, removing the instruments for blood sampling out of his bag of tricks. "Will be to let the panel render while you work on your watch."

A twitter of her irritation crossed his own mind, and he grinned to himself as she replied with forced nonchalance, "You brought the dampeners?"

Jedikiah pulled three of the disks out of his bag. "These were spares for the ceiling mounted ones in Ultra's building, so they're useless without a power source." He gave a flicker of a smile. "Not that they'd work without actually touching you, anyway."

"The watch runs off a battery, which fuels the dampener," Stern explained, taking the disks and examining them. "These will do nicely. And thank you for getting spares."

Really, they were on 'thank you' terms? Was it just Jedikiah, or were they on relaxed status outside the stark grey building they called second home? If he didn't know better, he'd venture to call their interaction amicable. And that just wouldn't do. To have his blackmailee agreeable in anything but the most basic, morally applicable way for the carnal nature of their arrangement would hint at feelings Jedikiah was methodically tearing down, even as they reared up repeatedly like the undead hordes of fiction. "I don't want a repeat of this," he replied shortly, letting it sting with blame. "Make a backup repressor so your secret won't interfere with your job again."

Stern stiffened slightly, and when she spoke, it was almost the same tone as she used at work. "It won't happen again."

Jedikiah busied himself with setting up a tray of vials and needles stripped of their wrappings, while his secretary busied herself with her sleeve. Stern pulled out a chair in his line of sight, and Jedikiah had to swallow his surprised expression as he sat to face her. She had removed the hoodie due to the restrictiveness of the sleeves, leaving her in a tight black camisole that made his pulse pick up.

"Just how many tubes are you gonna take?" she asked, the same worried-and-hiding-it highness in her tone. She visibly flinched when Jedikiah began to tie off the rubber strap to her upper arm.

"One for syphilis, one for HIV - " Jedikiah began to rattle off.

"A number, Price."

"About eight, Stern," he replied, mimicking her inflection.

The paranormal secretary's wide eyes flitted to his, and her brainwaves skittered across his forehead before being forcibly reeled back. Just as forcibly, she took a deep breath and fisted her hand. The clench was more to steady they shaking, Jedikiah noticed.

The blonde man pulled on disposable gloves, eyeing the internally warring woman. "You alright there, Stern?" he half-taunted, half-asked.

At the snap of the gloves, she'd gone a shade paler. "Dandy, never better," she rejoined.

 _Who'd have thought the mighty telepath would be scared of needles?_ he thought, huffing quietly.

"Heard that," Stern ground out. "I'm not scared."

"Right," Jedikiah said sarcastically. "So the fact you're reading my mind on accident means...?"

"Just take the damn blood," she snapped, jaw ticking.

Jedikiah picked up the plastic housing with the needle that would let him insert tube after tube without pause, considering his frightened secretary. "I'll have to do the same thing, you know," he said by way of half-assed comfort.

She shook her head, ponytail bobbing. "Not helping, Price."

With her head ducked, breath rapid, and fingers folded against trembling, it was the second most raw emotion Jedikiah had seen in his employee, after her lusty hatred on the office sofa. His brow furrowed in consternation as it occurred to him he didn't want to truly scare her, not when she was so vulnerable. He had better, more enjoyable ways to mess with Laura Stern than fear.

At the thought of those 'ways' an idea came to him, and he placed the needle back on the tray with a clatter. "Come 'ere," he sighed, seizing Stern firmly by the wrists and pulling her towards him.

"What - ! Hey!" she said sharply as Jedikiah maneuvered her to sit in his lap.

"Quiet," he interrupted lazily, cementing her back to his chest with a forearm around her waist. After a moment of gripping his arm and arranging her legs to avoid falling, Stern realized that her reaction would determine the climate of the following scheme. Pointedly, she loosened her grasp and the tension in her spine, pouting because she had no reasonable recourse.

"Good girl," he murmured against her nearly bare shoulder. A rumble of thunder matched his timbre.

Stern's breath hitched once, then again as he pressed his lips to her scapula, to the mark he had left there in their first encounter. He was pleased to see her bra strap had kept it red and prominent longer than normal, and set about renewing it with shielded teeth while his free hand sought the dip below her left breast.

"Jedi-... Price," she corrected as he traced the sensitive underside of her breast through the camisole _. Dammit dammit dammit,_ sailed through Jedikiah's frontal lobe as her panic caused her to cross boundaries.

Moving to the patch of skin under her ear, Jedikiah said between nips, "Seeing as you've foregone 'sir', call me what you like." To punctuate, he scraped his teeth across the tendon. "I want to hear my name from your pretty mouth."

Stern gasped and her stomach contracted under his arm as he bit her ear unapologetically, worrying it slightly. "Jed- !"

Grinning, the man kissed the scrape in reward, licked the bite. "Close enough."

She squirmed as he continued his assault: cupping and squeezing her breast, pinching and pulling the nipple through the fabric before repeating the same attacks on the other. He was getting hard, but trying not to let his excitement get away from him without guarantee of relief. There was science to be performed, and that did not involve an erection. Still, keeping Stern off-balance would only aid his agenda, so he choked his arm up under her breasts in preparation. When he flattened his palm against her taut stomach, fingers down, and started a slow, sensuous slide towards her pubis, she tightened her hold on his pants leg. "Wait, wait, please," she whispered, canting her hips away.

Jedikiah surprised himself by listening, pausing over her navel. "What?"

"We have things to do," she said, reminding Jedikiah he was still gloved and awaiting her blood. Stern shifted her shoulders then, arranging her torso so she could place her eyes against his neck without significant strain. She graced the spot with her wet lips before doing so; the tremulous and unprecedented move drawing a throb from the cock and a groan from the throat Jedikiah. Her non-tourniquetted arm raised to slide through his hair awkwardly, but no less intentionally. "May I...?"

Jedikiah felt her mind fully brush his for the first time since she'd fled the office, and his own psyche seemed to instinctively make room for it inside his skull. "Come in," he responded, curious as to her purpose.

The woman flooded his brain like the rain pouring through the gutters outside, occupying fully whatever space given like so much water. Her presence felt like a stream moving among the craigs of his consciousness, soaking in his arousal, the occupation of his pleasured thoughts and his hands as they tingled for her skin. She seemed to settle there: a dammed creek. "Go ahead, do it," she murmured, occupied.

Jedikiah barely moved to pick up the needle again. Reflecting on the fortune of his skill with the usually awkwardly arranged and squirming recipients of his needles, he single-handedly placed the raised, powder blue vein and began to draw. Her mental touch did not distract him any more than her fingers laced in his hair.

Moving to replace the full vial with an empty one didn't cause Stern to change pose, or change focus. She seemed content to explore the shores of her stream in his head, lightly and (remarkably, arguably) unobtrusively investigating whatever she touched. She found his college years and spent a few minutes there, amusedly absorbing younger Jedikiah's hair and taste in music.

By the fourth vial Stern had moved on to a handful of harmless memories of Stephen's father and Jedikiah's brother, Jack Jameson. She considered the similarities between the dead man and each of his relatives that she knew, contemplating recessed blonde genes.

"I got our mother's hair," Jedikiah said, taking the fifth vial studiously. "Stephen could have been blonde, too, but he got his mother's dominant hair color."

She gave a single hum of understanding before saying contemplatively, _Jack. You miss him._

Jedikiah was given pause on how to respond, watching the ruby liquid spill into the plastic tube. He settled for the truth. "Yes, I do." It took a great deal of care to avoid mentally touching on any facets of his plan connected to Jack, or Stephen. Stern need not know, and need not be endangered.

 _Endangered, sure,_ he mentally scoffed. _Or get in my way._

 _Well excuse me,_ Stern muttered, moving on.

Jedikiah could tell she didn't begrudge him his secrets for the simple reason that she had her own to jealously guard. If he wanted, the short highway between their minds could be traversed into Stern's skull, too. And if Jedikiah didn't have needles stuck into her arm, he might have investigated the edges of her mind, like waves investigate the beach.

 _Maybe_ , the paranormal ventured, affecting a smirk without using her mouth. _If you play nice enough._

Jedikiah smiled as he balanced the filling sixth tube with his right hand, and reached down to cup her sex with his left. The record-skipping sensation was even more hilarious when it occurred in his own head, free to witness. _Hey! Quit it!_ Stern yelped, canting her hips yet again.

Jedikiah rubbed her shamelessly through her yoga pants, canvassing her womanhood with four rhythmic fingers. "But, if we're keeping track of things that are remarkably edible..."

Again, the record skipped, though this time nearly hard enough to slip off the player. Stern's actual mouth fell open at what Jedikiah implied, mind utterly blanking for a full three seconds while he looked on wolfishly. _You cannot be serious,_ she all but babbled, whirlpools appearing in her quiet stream.

"I don't generally play nice," he replied. With a light smack to her pussy that made her physically and psychically jump, he exchanged the sixth vial for the seventh.

Stern was aroused and angry, now. Just the way he liked her. _Where do you get off, Price?_ she snarled, vehemence echoing in his skull like thunder. _What the hell do you like so damn much about...!_ She trailed off, foregoing the question in favor of seeking the answer herself.

She broke the dam of her streams, pouring through his mind again in a reckless freefall that made Jedikiah grimace, trying to grasp at her watery trail. "You are not allowed to - "

 _To what?_ she challenged, evading him skillfully. _You let me in. I want answers._

"Then ask ME and I'll tell you!" Jedikiah gnarled, trying to stem the tide with a broom.

Stern seemed to startle back to herself at his tone, stopping her careen though his mind. She surged backwards, withdrawing and receding like floodwaters in fast-motion. Jedikiah felt her lashes tickle his neck as she opened her eyes again. Dropping her hand from his hair, her breath fanned over his collarbones as she asked with sheepish regret and apology all rolled into one, "You done yet?"

"Almost," Jedikiah grunted, placing the final vial into the housing. His neck was tense as a bowstring. Having a paranormal pour through your every mental defense like water through sand was disconcerting, frightening even. Certainly not a comfort to Jedikiah, or an assurance as to Stern's species' trustworthiness.

But then, their trust was superficial, at best. The type of trust placed in two sentient beings of different species to not bite out jugulars during coerced sex.

She sighed as the silence wore on, pausing a full minute before saying softly, "I am sorry. I got out of hand. I won't ever do it again."

Jedikiah clenched his jaw once, warring with his grudging nature and his untoward agenda. He had to respect her guts at apologizing immediately. He could feel her regret like a dull ache, but wasn't sure he wanted to assuage it (or even how). "You want to know why," he said simply.

Stern's words breezed intimately through his collar. "Why you chose this particular method of blackmail. Yes."

Jedikiah plucked the needle carefully out of her vein, pressing a gauze patch into the crook and untying the tourniquette. Truthfully, he wasn't sure why, only that having her settled something inside him he hadn't known was awry. But why did it have to be Laura Stern? "I don't know, Stern," he said with exasperation. "Maybe you're the finest ass I've seen in years, and I took the opportunity when it was presented."

Even when being mysogynistically objectified, Stern could read between Jedikiah's lines. She laughed like the gale beyond the windows as he pressed her arm into bending, trapping the gauze as she raised her head. "Only you," she chuckled. "Only you would square off with a powerful telepath for sex."

Wanting to distance himself, Jedikiah sniffed. "Well, the sex part is dependent on these test results. I have my reservations."

Stern extricated herself from his lap with all the grace of fluid, unperturbed by his insult. "I'm only obliging because fair's fair," she said sweetly. "I'm clean as a whistle. How about you?"

Jedikiah's eyes narrowed. He stripped off his gloves in such a way that the outsides were reverted internally, and unbuttoned his shirt front. "You'll soon see, Stern," he promised darkly. "And then I will make you regret your smart-ass comments."

"How so?" she queried mockingly. There was veiled interest in her eyes as she watched him strip out of his dress shirt, revealing the undershirt that clung to his gym-grown and assault-tested muscle.

Jedikiah smiled brightly as he brought the tourniquette to bear on his own arm, deftly tying it off with his teeth and one hand like a drug addict. "You've already revealed your medical kink."

"You have exactly zero evidence of that," she replied with a contrived frostiness.

Bringing a fresh needle to bear on his own arm, Jedikiah's smile honeyed. "Remember those tests you agreed to?"

Stern's coolness dissipated somewhat into a flutter of nerves that felt like a moth hitting Jedikiah's forehead.

"I rest my case," the Ultra man said, exchanging the vial.

"I'll be damned if you get anymore cookies," she muttered venomously under her breath.


	8. Chapter 8

While Jedikiah was still drawing blood, Stern disappeared down the hall and came back minutes later with a small toolbox and a tray of miscellaneous electronic parts. She settled on the far end of the table and began to take apart her watch, then one of the dampeners. Jedikiah unpacked a microscope, slides, various exposure chemicals, and the testing papers that would deem the blood infected or not.

The rain turned from lashing to a steady pounding, suitable for contemplation and naps.

The quiet was only slightly less comfortable than that of their Ultra working environment. Unbidden, each fell into the old habit of periodically glancing up at the other: for Stern, to discern if there was anything she could assist with; for Jedikiah, to simply study the way she pursed her lips when she concentrated on a particularly tiny screw. The tinkering must have been a soothing to her as lab work was to him, because the surging presses of her mind faded away to nothing as she focused on her task.

"How do you even know how to do that?" Stern asked with a little awed interest, nodding at Jedikiah as he used a pipette to apply exposure to a test tube.

"I'm an evolutionary biologist, Stern," he chastised, eying the faintly fizzing solution. "A little test like this is child's play."

She paused a beat before replying lowly, "When I see you wrapped up in that suit, I tend to forget."

Jedikiah was almost suspicious of such a blatant compliment. That was hardly their style. "Do I befuddle your womanly brain?" he teased with less bite than intended.

Stern rolled her eyes at him from across the table. "I'm trying to be nice, Price."

"I thought we agreed on 'Jed,'" the Ultra man all but purred.

The paranormal's cheeks tinted pink, her lips pursing in a frown that was partially directed at him, and partially directed inward due to the billboard-like quality of her face. Jedikiah surmised that he occupied a very sweet spot indeed, if he could melt the frosty shell of his secretary with a few words.

He need not dwell on that, or the fact she could do the same, if she so chose.

"We can add suit kink to the list," Jedikiah grinned, garnering a horrendous scowl from Stern. "In all honesty, though," he continued gamely. "I wouldn't know what the fuck to do with any of that." He jerked his chin at the contents of her shallow tray: bits and bobs of wire, computer chips, housing, and clock parts that confounded him.

"Getting the dampener inside isn't hard," she replied absently, lifting a small soldering gun. "It's getting the watch to work afterward that's a bitch."

"Why the duct tape on the previous version?" Jedikiah asked curiously, remembering how he'd clued in the first time while sitting in the cafeteria.

Stern frowned, a thin stream of smoke coming from the wiring she touched with the hot tip. "I used one of the tactical unit's slap-on dampeners for that version, and they're bulkier to make up for the lack of a power source. The watch backing wouldn't fit."

"I see," Jedikiah said, dipping the first two testing strips and holding them up for inspection. "Look at that: we're both Hep-free."

"Yay," she replied sarcastically. Thunder growled as though in imitation.

Jedikiah went to work repeating the process with the next batch. After a few minutes, he could sense Stern's brain start to fire up about something, sending little static-cling sensations over his scalp. "What is it?" he asked long-sufferingly, not looking up from the microscope.

Stern dithered for a moment. "About these tests..."

"What about them?" Jedikiah asked, fiddling with the macro dial.

"What exactly do you have... planned for the results?"

The blonde raised his eyes to regard the woman searchingly. Why was there concern flickering in the depths of her eyes? She knew he wouldn't go to the Founder with the information: not so long as he could indulge in that sickly wired little body.

Was she concerned for the other paranormals? She'd never shown any real kinship to them, save for Stephen (who was, admittedly, ingratiating when he wanted to be, the little twerp). Stern treated everyone at Ultra exactly the same: with the expectation of perfection, and repercussions for any variant. The insights Jedikiah might gain from her DNA would lend themselves to Ultra's genocidal agenda, true: but it was simply a byproduct of Jedikiah's goals.

He might be able to figure out how to strip individual powers, instead of all three, but that wasn't appealing to his speciesist views. He wanted all Tomorrow People eradicated, if not powerless: accomplishing some fraction of that was against his nature, illogical.

If Jedikiah were honest, he hadn't really thought that far ahead. He knew he needed to place Stern somewhere in his species hierarchy, for better to judge her and decide her ultimate fate. If he deemed her relatively harmless (with 'relatively' being the operative word!), then he would let her traipse back to the Raleigh office at the end of her time and bury the hatchet.

But if his tests could put her in the ballpark of a true paranormal, then he could treat her as such: decommission her powers when she exerted her usefulness, damn the consequences. But then, being the first (and only?) of her kind, she was so special, Jedikiah discarded the idea of depowering her hastily. He'd send her to the Citadel for safekeeping.

"I should hope you're not dumb enough to try that," Stern snorted, jogging Jedikiah's attention.

Jedikiah's eyes narrowed, and with an uncomfortable jolt he realized she'd been privy to every thought of his internal debate. "Stop listening in on my thoughts," he spat.

Stern adopted a haughty look. "It's not like I'm doing it on purpose! And besides, the stripping serum - " she cut off sharply, mouth slamming shut like a steel trap.

That interested the Ultra man keenly. "The serum what?" he prompted intensely, setting aside his rack of test tubes.

The woman across the table dropped her own tools in response, looking equally ready to defend herself or bolt, but too angry to entertain either. "Like I'm telling you," she sneered.

"Unless you want the Founder to know your secret, you will elaborate. Immediately," Jedikiah ground out.

Stern's jaw muscle ticked as she looked away. There was a hint of betrayal in her posture than Jedikiah tried to ignore, along with how it panged. He hadn't drawn the line since that first time on the couch, and in between, they'd almost been on the same page. It was almost as though they had forgotten the nature of their relationship, and its latest progression.

Jedikiah found that inexcusable. He had power over her, period, and would maintain that.

"When I first entered the workforce," Stern began, gripping the edge of the table and speaking stiffly to its gleaming surface. "I bounced around a few places before landing in Ultra. I didn't have my watch back then. I was beaming psychic energy like the sun." She looked down at the watch in question, and a tinge of - embarrassment? shame? - colored her voice as she started reassembling the timepiece. "When I figured out what they were, and what Ultra was doing to Tomorrow People, I stole a vial of power stripping serum and tried it on myself." She gave a single note of derisive laughter. "It was foolish. A moment of weakness. As you can tell, it didn't work."

Jedikiah sucked a breath at the implications, his brain spinning to process and quantify the repercussions of this revelation. He couldn't tune out her introspection, though, the tone of which pricked at his twisted heart.

It sounded like a sore spot, regret brought on by a rash decision. "After it failed," Stern continued. "I managed to fully accept myself." _There was no other choice, really,_ her mind mused morosely, born to Jedikiah's consciousness by her poignant wistfulness. "But I'm glad, now. Accepting what I was made a gift out of a curse."

"Your DNA must be so fundamentally different, the serum didn't affect you." He sounded excitedly intrigued, even to his own ears, like he was a sophomore back in college studying five-limbed rats. "You're a mutant."

"You sure know how to talk a girl up," she replied blithely, screwing the backing onto the watch.

Jedikiah was loathe to set aside the scientific rendering of this new data, but he had an opportunity to plumb Stern's sketchy past. In a way he could justify it, as it was an exploration of the nurture, not the nature. "How'd you stay hidden?" asked Jedikiah.

Stern scoffed. "You'd be surprised how unobservant people can be. Particularly if they don't know what another mind feels like. And it wasn't as bad back then: my powers have grown with my age."

"That's another thing," Jedikiah said, finding another irking unknown. "How'd Ultra not find you when you broke out?"

A chuckle rattled from the secretary's throat, and she deigned to look at him. "How old do you think I am?" she laughed.

"Loaded question," Jedikiah grumbled. "But if I assume you broke out at around fifteen, and you're - what, twenty-eight now? - then what you're saying doesn't make sense. The breakout tracking system was online by then."

"Your baseline assumption is incorrect," Stern said, a smug gleam in her eye. "I never broke out. I was born this way."

Jedikiah reeled for a moment, his mind literally fritzing out as it tried to comprehend every extrapolation of this fact. Not only born a paranormal, but immune to the depowering serum? A controversy of crazed levels, served up in sorority sweats on maddening legs.

Son of a bitch, this woman hit every one of Jedikiah's buttons with a ballpeen hammer. She stimulated him mentally, physically, intellectually. Jedikiah had to marvel of the completeness of his cosmic fucking.

Cosmic, his ass. As if any force but his own governed his life. "And your parents were - "

"Utterly normal," Stern replied swiftly, smugness giving way to tight warning as she saw where he was going. Hell, she'd witness his ruthlessness firsthand: she knew him. "I ought tell you up front: they're both dead."

"Buried or cremated?" Jedikiah asked, before he could stop himself. Stern bristled like an angry cat with righteous indignation, but before she could vent, Jedikiah held up a hand. "Sorry, that was insensitive."

"I'll say!" she spat venomously. "But in the interest of clearing their names off your fuck-it-up list, I'll tell you. They were cremated. You walked past them on my mantel on the way in."

Jedikiah leaned around the archway leading to the living room and, sure enough, two tasteful urns sat on opposite ends of the cedar half-log mantel over the fireplace.

Stern stood abruptly, snatched two empty petri dishes from the table beside him. "Stay," she commanded stonily, warranting zero argument. "I'll allow you to test them, but you're not getting anywhere near them."

"I have some propriety," Jedikiah grumbled.

She eyed him fathomingly, and he loathed it. "Not with my kind, you don't."

Jedikiah held her despising gaze until she broke it with a scoff. He was surprised that she was allowing him to intrude so completely on her personal life. But having just threateningly reminded her of her place in their arrangement, she was probably trying to avoid him doing it again. He watched her enter the dimly lit den, carefully unscrew the lid to the left urn, and dip out a pinch of ash. Muttering what might have been apologies too soft to be heard, she screwed the lid back down again tightly. She repeated the process to the right urn, then stalked back into the kitchen.

"Mom," she plunked down the left urn's contents. "Dad." The right landed next to it, though a decidedly strange distance away from each other. _Meet the jerk who's screwing me,_ she thought acidly, strong enough to be unintentionally heard. "Keep 'em separated," she muttered aloud. "Because they were happier that way in life." Stern sniffed disdainfully, opting to set her tea kettle instead of regaining her seat.

Jedikiah ignored the seeping angst/anger cocktail, or the fact that, in essence, he'd just been introduced to her parents. Really, what could he say to that?

He left his secretary to her tea preparations, but watched her out of the corner of his eye while he broke Mrs. Stern down to a molecular level with saline and gentle swirling. Stern Jr. was stiff-backed and radiating mixed emotions as thickly as the rain falling outside. Jedikiah couldn't very well block her out, and sure as hell wasn't incentivized enough to play therapist, so he contented himself with cherry picking specific feelings out of the stream.

Anger: Stern was angry at him for forcing her to open this can of worms, much less in his presence. She was angry at her parents for being a can of worms to begin with. Jedikiah could sense they had been an unhappy couple to be around, and the echoes of their yelling still sounded across Stern's mind and heart. To him, they were the cries of a banshee over the moor: haunting and distant, but inspiring emotions that somehow were not his own.

Betrayal: Jedikiah had expected this one, but not the depth from whence it came. Stern saw every month they had worked together, every accomplishment wrought, through the lens of blackmail. She was counting all the good things they'd hammered out together as loss because of Jedikiah's blackmailing.

That kind of hurt.

Jedikiah huffed quietly, feeling that nagging guilt rise up in his gut again. Stern hardly deserved what he was putting her through. But it wasn't as though he could back out now! He had Stern exactly where he wanted.

He kept telling himself that.

Couldn't she see what this really was...?

"Do you want some tea?" she grunted sullenly from the stove, where the kettle sang shrilly.

Jedikiah applied some of Mrs. Stern to a slide, albeit with more respect than warranted, in the same way Stern applied the steaming water to the pot of leaves. "Sure," he said idly. A peace offering she probably took as contemptible pity. "What the hell."

Stern reached for two teacups from the open cabinet: a sage green one towards the front, clearly her favorite, and another blue-on-white that was from the top shelf.

When she set his down with care at his elbow, Jedikiah was strangely flattered to find it was the green one. It was a black tea, at least, thankfully. And it smelled orangey and palatable. There were two sugar packets placed thoughtfully next to the cup.

Once Stern had resettled in her chair and a degree of calm had fallen over her roiling mind, Jedikiah asked over his steaming cup, "Did they know what you were?"

Stern inhaled the steam of her own floral-smelling (jasmine?) cup. "No," she sighed. "I was a smart kid. What I couldn't control, I hid pretty well. Again, my powers grew with time." Her eyes grew distant. "I got in trouble a lot for knowing stuff I shouldn't have."

It hung in the air, implied but unshared. Drinking. Cheating. Worse. Jedikiah replaced his teacup. "Sounds like this isn't nearly strong enough."

Stern snickered, but it was wry and bitter. "As I'm sure you can relate, Jed, nothing is."

A coil of inappropriate arousal unfurled in Jedikiah's gut at her familiarity. Yes. He could relate.

The tea worked its near-voodoo magic on the secretary. She sipped deeply for a long minute, regarding the storm outside pensively, effectively ignoring him long enough to clean emotional house. It was rare she ever took her attention totally off of Jedikiah, and had been such since they'd first met. It implied she always kept one eye on him, in case he decided to pounce like a barely domesticated animal.

He ought be praised by the thought that she found him dangerous, but 'dangerous' somehow translated into 'untrustworthy' in Jedikiah's mind. She'd admitted on the car ride over that she did trust him. But just how far?

Jedikiah could literally feel the moment she shoved down the past, boxed it away in its dusty corner of her mind. It was like the sun had come out from behind heavy clouds, though the literal incarnation declined to follow suit. "The second I stepped foot into Ultra's building," she continued heavily. "I knew what they were. I could feel the dampeners working, pressing like fingers into my skin." She gulped a hot swallow, grounding her mind back in her own skull from where it had unconsciously sought his like magnetic north.

"I knew it wasn't quite enough if push came to shove, so after the serum debacle, I had a choice to make: turn tail, or make it work. Ultra was a good fit for me. Well," she quirked a dimple. "I made it a good fit for me. What better place to hide than plain sight? So I snagged a dampener out of the wall and carried it in my bra. Nobody caught me. Nobody looked at me weird because they felt my mind brush theirs. After a while, I cobbled a necklace. Then a watch. Ultra kept me in their talent pool, eventually hired me full-time and..." she gestured at him. "Here we are."

"Here we are," Jedikiah repeated. With his curiosity satisfied for the moment and Stern's psyche settled, Jedikiah returned his attention to the goal at hand: getting clearance for pussy.

Setting down the teacup he hadn't noticed he'd emptied, Jedikiah displayed a handful of dipped test papers on a tray, each corresponding to a vial of blood labeled JP or LS. "We're both clean for everything."

"I should hope so," Stern said with a cocked brow. She was slowly righting herself, realigning herself with the game. "I suppose you'll be wanting to get right down to business," she said with a casually put-upon air, placing her own teacup on the saucer with exaggerated care.

It was sorely tempting, Jedikiah had to admit. The gray bra strap peeking out of the camisole made him yearn to discover what she was wearing today, and then rip it off her body. But it didn't feel right, not at the moment. Stern had just bared her soul to him, and there was a raw look lurking in her eyes he had no business encouraging. Jedikiah was a blackmailer, but he was not a complete asshole. "I know you're eager," he patronized, earning a glare and a humorously impressed smirk. "But there's still science to be conducted. Your sexual appetite will have to subsist with a tease."

"You are so full of shit," she snorted with a laugh, relievedly leaving the past behind her.

Jedikiah moved aside the blood testing equipment to make room for the EEG briefcase. "You've got no idea what you're in for," he stated with an insidious smile.

Stern's suppressed shiver found escape as a glide of goosebumps up her exposed arms.

 

Stern was acquiescent for the netted helmet of electrodes on her head. The bloodpressure cuff hanging slackly on her arm and the heartrate monitor clasped to her finger were reasonable. She even indulged Jedikiah's lingering on the placement of the three sticky electrodes on her chest, though he clearly peeled them off just to hear her hold her breath and to feel her deathgrip on her psyche tighten.

When Jedikiah produced a camera, however, Stern voiced some trepidation.

"Why the camera?" she asked, crossing her ankles primly. Laura Stern made quite a pretty picture: posture perfectly stiff, green eyes dancing with suspicion that this was far, far more than a clinical test. Every minute or so, she brushed his mind with her own: feather-light, as though checking in. Although Jedikiah kept his expression schooled to neutrality, what she picked up on the edges of his mind was undoubtedly contributing to her slightly elevated pulse rate.

Jedikiah locked the tripod legs and sighted her, and the table he'd sat her upon, through the viewfinder. "It's a common practice for electroencephalography," he explained.

Stern gave him a sidelong look, the electrodes not diluting her disbelief.

"Picture your neural pathways as a constant stream of ions," Jedikiah said, turning on both the camera and the monitoring machines. "When your brain is active in any way - basically, anything beyond braindead - it pushes those ions in waves throughout your brain, to your scalp, then to the electrodes where they're rendered into this." Still behind her, he turned the briefcase carefully around to show a series of lines on an imbedded screen that made small dips and rises.

"But my power doesn't stay in my physical brain, or even near it," Stern said, brow knitting. "For pete's sake, I talked to you earlier today over twenty miles away!"

"I recall. That's a set of tests for another time." Jedikiah reached out to straighten an electrode behind her ear, earning a twitch from her body and a flick of surprise from her mind.

"When you do that," Jedikiah said, indicating his cognizance of her reaction. "You push waves, shall we say, harder than normal. The EEG shows it like that," he pointed to the screen, which had produced a decidedly heavier dip in the lines running across it.

"Still doesn't explain the camera," she muttered.

"To synch the EEG's data with video and audio means a more complete test," Jedikiah replied. "Showing what stimuli produces what physiological and neurological reaction is only good research." Sitting down in front of her knees in his chair, he placed the briefcase trailing wires to the paranormal's head array in his lap. "In other words... " he drawled suggestively, peering up at her with a sinful smile. "I want to watch you later."

The secretary swallowed, fingers wrapping around the table edge.

Without the Ice Queen persona resplendent in a blouse and heels, Stern was literally an open book. It delighted and aroused Jedikiah to no end. "Oh, I almost forgot," Jedikiah said, standing up again. He dug around in his duffle bag theatrically, letting her tension build.

When he extracted a length of broad silk ribbon, Stern's face was positively priceless. "You cannot be serious," she all but whined.

Jedikiah's predatory smile was the last thing she saw before the blindfold hid her wide eyes. "Dead serious," he replied, knotting it over her left ear. Seating himself yet again in front of her, he took one last admiring look at the fruits of his handiwork: deep blush painting high cheekbones, teeth worrying a plump bottom lip, a firm clench to her knees, a hard grip on the edge of the table.

The machine readouts were only confirmation that Stern was well on her way. Medical kink: confirmed.

"Let's get started," Jedikiah said, unable to hide the smirk in his voice.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter there is sensory deprivation, ice play, wax play, and science!  
> Sexytimes in the next chapter, I promise.

Jedikiah wasn't joking. He really did have a battery of tests to put Laura Stern through. Blindfolding her was not simply expediting his sexual agenda... though it had a part. As he set up the remainder of his supplies, ranging from innocuous to brow-ticking to blush-worthy, he enjoyed the internal adjustments Stern was cataloguing with the arrest of her vision. Though she couched it in as much stillness as she could muster, it was clear that she wasn't overtly fond of the blindfold. Jedikiah felt privileged to render her so discomfited for, clearly, the first time.

"What's the blindfold actually achieve?" Stern asked, edgy from the array of foreign sounds she could hear as he took supplies from his duffle.

"The only way to make your reactions pure," Jedikiah replied calmly, making note of her behavioral change with audio stimuli. "Is to exclude any clues and distractions." Not untrue, but he was excellent at selling fractions of the truth embedded in falsehood like real diamonds in fake gold.

Jedikiah paused to let the enjoyment flicker to life in his heart. Reducing Stern to base instinct and reaction satisfied him on a primal level. He was one sick bastard. But then, she already had an inkling of that. "These are sensory tests to discover your baseline without exerting your powers," Jedikiah said, with just enough ambiguity to irritate Stern. Sensing her haunting the edges of his consciousness, he commanded evenly, "Stay out of my mind unless I tell you to."

Stern fled the shadows of his brain with disappointment, but not before asking, _Why not just let me use my watch?_

"Because I also want a baseline for your level of control over your powers," Jedikiah explained, humored at her reluctance to loose the reins. That was probably the most accurate goal of his testing, and might prove answer to myriad questions rolling around in his hypothesis. Was she lacking control because she'd been born this way? It didn't seem reasonable, because Roger had only gotten stronger with age, and the Founder had hinted that age influenced his power, too. Did that mean her development was different for having never lived without her powers, or for being singly powered to begin with? So what was the stick in the mud with Laura Stern's evolution? Was there something she wasn't telling him?

The only way to know would be to experiment.

"Let's begin. First test is simple: sound," Jedikiah said, grazing her cheek with an earbud before gently inserting it, then repeating with the other ear. With a ticking scroll on his Ipod, he found his pre-composed playlist and started the roll. A nice sonata by Beethoven drifted through the cords. For the approximate thirty seconds it took Stern to relax, Jedikiah continued to set up his sequence of testing supplies: fetching ice cubes, lighting a single candle, traying some edibles. The undulations on the EEG screen remained fairly constant, wide and regular.

Stern's bodily flinch when the music abruptly changed to satanic screamo was well-documented by the EEG. In a minute or so, it switched back, and then changed again with a random cut. Jedikiah was busy doling some liquids into pipettes and charting the vitals of his subject via a virtual interface with his tablet when the pressure behind his eyeballs began to grow. Glancing over to the subject in question, he noted her teeth grinding and her hands fisted. The EEG was showing a steadily raising ceiling to the frequencies.

Jedikiah plucked the earbuds from her head. "I think that's enough."

Stern visibly deflated as the atrocious attack on her ears was lifted, and opened her mouth to undoubtedly berate his taste in music, but was headed off.

"Don't speak unless I ask something," Jedikiah continued smoothly. "It will skew the tests. Then we'll have to start from scratch."

The woman practically glared burning holes through the silk wrapped around her eyes, and that expressive mouth pursed in a pout. Jedikiah calmly took a note of his findings, letting the scratch of his pen fill the silence, and watched with a grin as her pulse elevated.

"Palms up and on your thighs." He had plans for those hands. "Mouth open." Really, that was almost just for fun. "And these," he tapped her femininely clenched knees. "Open. Try to relax your whole body." Going into a near-full split on Jedikiah's office desk had left a serious impression on the Ultra man, and a rapidly snowballing fantasy life.

Without her second biggest gun, her sharp tongue, Stern was left to silently hesitate for a few laborious seconds. With obedience colored by anxiety, she placed her hands open on her thighs and opened her knees about eight inches, sighing as she tried to untense.

"Wider," Jedikiah encouraged blandly, enjoying the play of reluctance over her remaining features.

Stern slid grudgingly apart to a full foot, giving Jedikiah just enough room to reach her (wet, hot, and clutching if memory served) womanhood, if he so chose. Oh, and those inner thighs he was dying to suckle marks onto. It was clear that she fathomed that potential by the tick of her jaw.

She would eventually understand that if it walked like a duck, quacked like a duck, and got erect like a duck, it was definitely a duck. Fuck him, there was something so damned alluring in her reluctant submission, her abject bravado answering his every challenge simply because she was Stern, and he was Jedikiah, and Stern never fucking backed down from him. Oh, the games he could, and would, hopefully, play on that thorny pride.

Jedikiah willed down his already interested cock. He had things to achieve before he could even consider bringing that into play.

"Good girl," Jedikiah purred. He was starting to pick up on the effect those two words had on her libido. He would explore the use of more sultry words later. "Now, to reiterate: this machine- " He readjusted one finicky electrode on her forehead, over the muddled brow. "Captures everything you do. You must not project your mind, speak, or move, or the data will be inadmissible."

Stern somehow managed to exude agreement and annoyance simultaneously with only her posture. No easy feat.

Jedikiah felt a flutter unease at the task set before him. Were this simply a scientific endeavor, he would be roger, green light all day. But throwing the sexual aspect into the mix, much less unknown to Stern, was jeopardizing. Would she be able to keep pace once the ball dropped? Would he be able to conduct her, physically and psychically blind, in the direction he wanted?

All good questions he would have answers to soon.

"Taste," he said shortly. "Open wide, there you go. And definitely swallow." He placed a sugar cube on her tentative tongue, watching mild relief wash over her as she discerned the morsel. Playing the double entendre against him in a bout of sensual boldness, she laboriously and loudly swallowed her mouthful and stuck her tongue out around a cat-like smile. The EEG screen showed a slight condensing of the hills and valleys, denoting pleasurable sensation.

"Naughty thing," he chuckled around his suddenly parched mouth. "I think I like that tongue. Keep it out." He filled a clean eyedropper with lemon juice and let three dribbles land on the twitching organ.

Stern grimaced and smacked, and the EEG showed the frequencies widening again. So far, so normal.

Jedikiah waited for her to stick her tongue out again, to see if she would without being told. Really, he wondered if she would interpret his whim as a standing order, like the cant of her legs and her hands, despite the humiliating context. When she did, albeit hesitantly, he gifted it with a sprinkle of salt.

He laid a toothpick laden with hot sauce from the Chinese takeout place on her tongue next, and her shoulders bounced a bit in a soundless laugh as though to say, _Oh please, I brush my teeth with hotter._ The EEG corroborated the sentiment, and the undulations even tightened up a bit.

 _So you like a little heat, do you?_ Jedikiah thought, eyeing the blind and alertly relaxed woman before him. "Smell's next." Snapping an ammonia capsule, the Ultra man held it under Stern's nose.

The recoil was so profound he chuckled. When Stern lifted her hand to sniffle and rub her violated nose, he caught it on the descent. "Did I say you could move?" he queried of her fingertips, letting his breath wash over them, the threat of a bite that would never come. "Remember the parameters, Stern."

Stern fought the urge to pull back from his grasp, and Jedikiah rewarded the effort by wrapping his lips around her index finger. This brought a recoil of a decidedly more carnal nature: a soft gasp, and a feeling like a 4.0 Richter scale earthquake between Jedikiah's ears that rattled down his spine. _Just wait until I pull out the stops,_ he thought.

Currently enjoying the tension building in Stern (the EEG frequency was quickening with every cycle), he traded to her middle fingertip and suckled lightly. Her ring finger garnered a graze of his teeth.

The secretary had such a deathgrip on her knee, it was a wonder the bone didn't grind. Her breath was huffing on the exhale, toes curling in her socks, chin tucked as though in avoidance of the enjoyment evidenced in her brainwaves. Her could feel her psychic presence curling in on itself, attempting to stay put, fighting the urge to investigate the perpetrator's mind. Jedikiah smirked around his mouthful and drew her smallest finger in as deep as it would go, indenting the base with his teeth and hollowing his cheeks...

"Uncle!" Stern gasped. "Uncle, fucking uncle, Jed!" All at once, her brain surged to envelope his like a wet, heavy blanket of arousal. She immediately retreated as he let her hand go, leaving him reeling just as much as she was, though with easier recovery. Pleased despite himself, Jedikiah folded his arms and watched her gather her mental presence like an ungainly load of laundry.

Winding her up was so much fucking fun. "I should start over from the top," Jedikiah sighed. "But seeing as that particular action wasn't part of the testing sequence, I'll let it slide." He rearranged her hands on her knees, stroking her palms flat.

Stern's heartrate was elevated, the two numbers separated by a slash telling what her covered eyes did not, and confirming what she sought to hide in tight posture and a prideful half pokerface. She seemed all the more determined to shut down outward reaction after embarrassing herself.

Stern was still Stern. But that was fine. Jedikiah was still Jedikiah.

The ice cubes did not clink: he'd placed them individually on a towel so no sound would prelude his intent. Jedikiah pressed the first dripping fragment to the side of her neck, garnering an understandable flinch and a jerky ascension in the brainwaves readout.

She did not indicate complaint, or anything else, for that matter. And that said it all.

Jedikiah stroked the cube down her neck, to the hollow of her throat, holding it there to seep trickles into her cleavage. With the pooling effect of each cold drop in her bra, Stern's heartrate ticked up another point.

Jedikiah eventually moved on, repeating the sensuous caress starting below her ear, but this time, languidly floated the ice over her shoulder, down her arm, across the sensitive track mark from their earlier blood draw. At this, a smattering of chillbumps fought their way past Stern's stoicism.

He left the cube cupped in her open palm to melt, picked up another. "Bring your knees to your chest."

With flawless grace, Stern maintained the ice in her palm and brought her legs up, balancing on her tailbone.

"Now rotate so your back is to me."

Befuddlement was clear in the tilt of her head before compliance, but she did as bade, her compaction avoiding Jedikiah's myriad supplies laid out on the table.

Jedikiah eyed the strong spine appreciatively, and with more poeticism than he usually attributed to himself, contemplated how that spine was a thorough barometer of Stern's moods: ramrod straight and imposing in her work; curved and loose with a cup of tea in her hands; arched in ecstasy under pleasure wrought by him.

Jedikiah soaked up the remainder of the ice in her hand with a towel, saying briskly, "Hug your knees, round out your back." Once she'd accomplished his demand, Jedikiah slipped an inquisitive and indicative finger under her camisole's hem.

Stern's breath shallowed as he lifted the thin shirt and unclasped her bra, exposing her back, lightly dusted with freckles. But damn, those tiny little imperfections made his mouth water to lay his lips on each one. Jedikiah briefly gave into the temptation to run his fingertip down her spine, riding each bump of a vertebrae with fastidious intent. He spanned the indentations of her kidneys with thumb and little finger, knowing he was cold from the ice.

Her heartrate jumped a full five BPM by the time he picked up another ice cube. He placed this one at the junction of her shoulderblades, noting the subtle twitch of the skin, and held it there. The drops that ran down her back had to tickle, but Stern was taking care not to squirm. When her forehead rested on her knees with a soft sigh, Jedikiah realized she was also keeping tight rein on her mind, too. Not so much as a whisper had crossed his consciousness since he'd sucked her fingers.

That would be changing soon.

Jedikiah lifted a pre-torn strip of tape with a gauze pad stuck to the middle, replaced the ice cube in his hand, and left the holding to the tape. The cold seep had to be affecting her by now, making the skin grow frustratingly numb but not senseless enough. The EEG was showing the same relative level of brain activity each test inspired.

He placed two more evenly spaced ice cubes with the tape on her spine, watching the gauze not quite capture every drop, and the escapees disappear into her waistband. A scrap of black lace peeked from under the pants, and Jedikiah hypothesized that she was wearing briefs.

Checking one last time to make sure she wouldn't thrash off the table of knock anything over, Jedikiah hefted the burning candle with anticipation.

No warning, no sound. The puddle surrounding the flame fell in a wave of translucent white, flowing down her back like 120F lava. Stern registered the pain with a baleful hiss like a cat and a harsh arch, every muscle jumping into relief as she clamped arms around her knees. Her mind broke free of its leash and invaded his like a camera flash, leaving afterimages phantoming across his vision in the wake of her surprise.

What he wasn't expecting, however, was what she did with the pain. His body found the tail-end of the sensation starting to spin into merciless, thought-shredding pleasure, but Stern evacuated before he could internalize it for himself. He could only observe as she breathed through clenched teeth, shifting despite herself because her nerves were at war discerning the nature of the sensation. After a few seconds of dissipating heat she flung her head back and moaned, filthy and needy and rocketing straight to Jedikiah's cock.

Nope. He definitely wasn't expecting that. "Again?" he asked hoarsely. Even though it would change the tone of everything, hell itself could not stop him from asking.

"Yes," she whispered, wrecked, rounding out her rakish spine again in invitation.

Jedikiah's mouth went positively dry. He dripped melted wax on the fan of each shoulder blade, alternating every few splotches, and little by little, Stern's mind began to shake loose again. She stole into his brain like a ghost, like drifts of fog, and even as she drew unconsciously closer, her arousal began to heat.

The EEG was all quick ranges, steadily building without sharps spikes in a maddeningly slow, deliciously torturous way. She tensed and relaxed, flinched and slackened, at once chasing each bright pinpoint of pain and relishing the previous' singe and fade.

This was as soothing for him as it was pleasantly jarring for her. Jedikiah felt both completely alert and numbly adrift. The world condensed down to only two people, ears pricked for sound and sensitive to the texture of the noises. Skin alight with raw feeling, stiff where old and pliant where new, nerves reaching out in anticipation for that next drop, that next singing pain that narrowed broad minds into a single moment, rolled them around a patch of pinked flesh.

Jedikiah wasn't opposed to the secondhand enjoyment, which was like watching porn on a theater screen, only way better. While he worked in quiet punctuated by breathy whines and subsonic whimpers, he explored the feel of her influence within his mind. He felt everything she felt, as quickly as it took to cross neurons, as fast as the streams of ions could clash. When the dots of wax started to coalesce into a shape he recognized, the Ultra man redoubled his efforts creatively.

Sometimes Jedikiah played with her, letting the wax drip on the same spot for several seconds, just to feel her body draw tighter and tighter through the makeshift bond. He occasionally let a drop land over her kidney, or on that last cervical vertebra, just to relish the proxy hunger. Her furnace fueled his, climbing sluggishly higher, at once mellow and poignant.

By the end of ten minutes, he puffed out the halved candle and admired his work. White, flaking wings dripped from Stern's shoulder blades. The gauze taped on was sodden with melted ice, and the remnants of the first hot spill were cracking from the shift of her vertebrae.

At the faint scent of smoke, Stern asked in a croak, "Are we done?"

"Yeah. We're done."

With a low groan, Stern unwrapped her limbs from their tense tangle, splaying enough for the returning bloodflow to chase the dregs of arousal from her mind, by extension, Jedikiah's. He helped her swing her legs back around, chafing those showy calves as much for his own benefit as for hers, as she was in no condition to heave herself from his skull, yet.

"That was... intense," Stern murmured.

"That was conclusive," Jedikiah corrected, rolling up the leg of the pants for better to reach the tingling muscle. His brain was abuzz with the new data, and he was itching to analyze it while it was fresh in his memory. The camera rolling in the corner could only remember so much for him. He felt rather than saw Stern roll her eyes at his reply, and that made him remember. "Do you want the blindfold off?" he asked.

Stern pointed the toes of the leg in his grasp, and Jedikiah squeezed the firmed muscle in response. She considered. "Not yet, I think. I'm still kinda... cross-wired."

He could feel it coming down their connection like he could feel a stormfront moving in. "That kind of play can rattle some people," he commented, switching her legs to separate out the cords of muscle with knowing fingers.

"Play, huh?" she smiled faintly. But she didn't say anything more.

Jedikiah let the silence lapse and his own thoughts dominate. He'd planned for this to be clinical, concise. In a moment, the span of her moan (which played on repeat in his head), that had been turned on its ear.

He hadn't meant to introduce her to his darker side quite like this. But there it was, hanging in the air, her cognizance slow and distant but ever-growing as she rose from the depths he'd pushed her to.

It was bound to happen, sooner or later. He'd talk about it more when she was ready to emerge from under the blindfold.

Watching the wax dry to opaque on her skin as he etched a few notes was tranquil. The occasional twitch of her toes, where they curled around the shin of his juxtaposed ankle and knee, felt so disturbingly normal he dared not investigate.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's Note: Oral sex for Stern in this chapter! I'll throw Jedikiah a bone in the next one, I think, along with some toppy!Stern to get some of hers back.  
> But that's heresy until it happens, so enjoy more dominant!Jedikiah in the meantime!

Eventually, she broke his concentration on neurological algorithms with a raspy, "Can you help me get this stuff off?"

She sounded more like Stern, less like the sensation-drawn creature from before. Jedikiah hazarded a return to his normal roguish ways. He set aside his tablet. "If you sit on my lap, I will."

Stern called his bluff with a hint of a smirk playing at her lips. She unwrapped her monkey toes from his pants leg and cautiously slid to the floor, the camisole still bunched up and her bra still unclasped, the cups loose, trailing a few wires from the EEG array. Jedikiah found the combination of logic and lingerie an unreasonable tease.

When she hesitantly reached a hand to the blindfold still wrapped around her head, she scrabbled around for the knot that proved too tough. "Ugh, you do it, Boy Scout."

Jedikiah grinned and placed hands on her hips. "Was wondering when you'd get around to it."

Stern pinked under the silk, sliding one leg along his thigh to align herself, and allowed Jedikiah's hands to guide her descent. When she settled warm and heavy across his lap, Jedikiah felt the oddest combination of natural and lusty. "I kind of liked it," she murmured as he worked the knot deftly.

"I can see that," he replied drily, unwrapping each layer slowly so the light penetration would be gradual.

"Are we gonna discuss it?" she asked, squinting as the final fold dropped. Her lashes were long enough to have gotten tangled and clumped in the crush. How was it that singular feature never failed to escape his notice?

Jedikiah shrugged, tossing the blindfold towards the duffle. "As you might have figured out," he began sarcastically. "Wax play is not generally used as a scientific inquiry into nerve response."

Stern harrumphed delicately, peeling the one of the electrodes off her chest. Jedikiah batted her hand away and slowly, agonizingly, peeled off the second. "No way. I've been in your mind, I'd know if you were... like that!" she finished in a yelp as he jerked the remaining quarter of the electrode off at once. Medical grade adhesive was a bitch.

"Good to know you're somewhat educated," Jedikiah said lightly, picking at the edge of the last electrode with his fingernail. Taking in her expression as he began to peel, he let seriousness color his tone. "It's not so much what's evident in my head, Stern, but what I've been doing since our little tryst began. What I'm doing even now."

Stern couldn't hold back both her mind and her bewilderment, so she sallied forth like the tide in favor of wracking her brain, giving Jedikiah the best seat in the house for her contemplation.

 _Pinned my wrists on the couch keeps picking out my turn-ons_ SHIT _oh God he knows what makes me nuts and I only confirm it_ FUCK _medical kink suit kink_ oh no _the blindfold_ oh hell the spanking fantasy _-_

"But we -... we're not-... you don't - " she spluttered. Even without their minds tangent, Jedikiah could have sensed her swirl of emotion: trepidation, uncharacteristic timidity, the toxicity of lust burning low in her inquisitive gut at the implications.

"Don't I?" he asked, low and dirty, pinning her with flinty eyes. "I think you're piecing it together, now." He wrapped a hand around the back of her neck and hauled her against his chest, only getting perfunctory bodily argument. Her barely-clothed tits crushed against him deliciously, soft little mounds that made him itch to explore. Looking down her white-crusted back brought a sense of pride to him. Fishing his security badge out of his pocket, he used it to pry up the edge of the wax at the top of her left shoulder.

"Relax, Stern," he said mildly. "I'm not a deviant. Different flavors, different strokes, that's all." He paused to peel off a sodden strip of tape and gauze. relishing her soft grunt. "This whole arrangement - and every permutation of my personal preferences - hinges on one thing exclusively. It's not control. It's not arousal. What is it, Stern?"

The woman was visibly trying to settle herself, trying to sweep her own mind back into her skull, and took a moment of thinking before answering. "Consensuality," she whispered, dawning.

Her quick intelligence and the sweet, almost virginal regression he'd brought out in her made Jedikiah's gut twist in pleasure. "Exactly," he hummed in agreement. "And for there to be consensuality, there has to be trust. For months, I've trusted you with every facet of data to come through my office, personal and otherwise. Remember the first day you showed up?"

Stern nodded slowly against his collarbone. "You let me borrow your keycard. The key to the city."

"That's right. I still trust you, Stern. That's how I knew I could push you into this position, once I knew your secret. I trust you to look out for yourself... and in the process, look out for me." Jedikiah pressed wet lips to her soft, pale shoulder over a smattering of freckles. "That's how I know you'd excel in this new field, like you do with everything else. If you'll give it a chance."

The scrape of the aforementioned keycard across her back was a pleasurable scratch to the itch of the dried wax. The flakes of it dusted down her back and to the tiles, the pile growing steady as snow.

Stern mulled. Jedikiah waited patiently, but with apprehension. He wanted her on board. He wanted her interested, and desirous, and horny with thoughts of what he might do to her, what new heights he would push her to. She clearly had a taste for it.

But all of that would come to a screeching halt if she said no. Which, admittedly, he could still work with, but it would be significantly less fun. If they added this new facet to the heady cocktail of power trade and paranormal and sexuality, it would complicate things. But then, they were complicated even before, in so many ways they pretended not to notice.

"I've never dealt with anything remotely like this before," she confessed to his neck in a wash of hot breath. It was similar to the lost tone she had when converting the medical records in Windows XP format.

Jedikiah grinned, letting it color his voice. "It's not all Two Girls, One Cup in here."

Her chuckle made her rub delectably against him. "I get it now. Why you wanted me out of your brain for this. Why the blindfold. You wanted me to draw my own conclusions, without visual or mental input from you." She hooked her chin over his shoulder, settling full-frontal and lax. The consequence was something akin to an embrace. "That was nicer than I gave you credit for, Jed."

Jedikiah swelled in both chest and cock at the readjustment of their pose. He'd gotten through. "Yeah, well, I'm still a dirty old man who intends to take you apart sexually."

Stern laughed, shrugging off the heaviness of the development like nature had shrugged off the rain outside. "As long as I hold final veto power, I reckon I can handle your 'personal preferences.' It's not like you scare me."

And that, most of all, made Jedikiah's insides darken deliciously. In the space of a few moments, the mood between them changed from lazy sexiness to tightening lust. He silently let the charge build between them until it was unbearable, thick in the air like fog. If she noticed him getting hard, she didn't mention it.

When the last flake of wax fell, Jedikiah stood quickly and plunked the secretary on the table.

"Hey!" she yelped, half-laughing. "What are you - ?"

Jedikiah bore her to the flat surface almost casually, the flat of his hand in the middle of her chest. He grabbed her behind the knees and pulled her forward, so their clothed sexes were flush: him, hard and wanting; her, hot as hell even through the clothes with her ass barely on the table. "I'd give you three guesses," he replied, capturing her hands and pinning them above her head. "But you wouldn't need the last two."

Stern automatically twisted in his hold, recognizing his grip from their first encounter. In order to get any sort of leverage, she had to grasp his waist with her legs. It still wasn't enough.

Jedikiah stared down at her like a piece of meat to be carved. "Earlier, you wanted to know where I get off." Pressing his lips to the reddened mark under her ear with feigned gentleness, he continued, "Well, here it is. Taking control of you, a potent paranormal, and making you come apart under my hands and mouth and cock... that is where I get off, Stern. That is my preference."

She shuddered on the inhale as her lust surged across fences, a mentally whispered, _Oh shit,_ hissing across Jedikiah's mind.

"If there happens to be some sensory deprivation, or some bondage," he traced light, tickling fingertips down to her ribs, which made her squirm slightly. "Then so be it."

Stern's mind was starting to color the horizon of his own like the dawn as she renewed attempts to wriggle free.

Jedikiah framed her like a lion over his kill and resettled the electrodes of the netted helmet over her wrinkled forehead. Sure enough, a glance at the EEG machine showed a definite concentration of the undulations, interspersed with sharper spikes of indeterminate source.

He would be utterly remiss in his duties to humanity if he did not discern the origin of such fluctuation.

He bent close to her ear, adoring the rasp of her ragged breath as the motion brought their bodies into further contact and stilled her. "Keep these," he squeezed her wrists. "Here. Or you'll learn my preferences in regards to punishment." To emphasize, he called up a high-definition memory of the spanking fantasy, knowing she was struggling to stay skin-deep.

Stern's breath hitched, and she nodded a nod laden with all comprehension and a thrilling, growing sprout of confidence. Though her hands fisted, she stopped moving to meet his eyes, pupils blown and expression hungry.

Fuck yes, she was game. She was his. Jedikiah couldn't have been more thrilled if he'd won a Nobel Prize and exterminated all the Tomorrow People in the same day. His pleased chuckle rumbled deep, groin-deep at her submission, the vibration running through her body, too, making her nipples tighten to be seen through her shirt, peeking under the ridden-up cups of her bra.

Letting go of her wrists was a test she passed. But then, did his paranormal secretary ever not? "We've seen what you can do without your power in play," Jedikiah declared, hovering down her body. "Let's put you through some paces with it."

"This is hardly a scientific endeavor!" she griped, voice breaking as he ducked low to tongue her exposed navel, loosing a filthy moan that she cut short on principle.

"Take it from the one with the doctorate: it qualifies," he told her bellybutton, his hot breath making her muscles flutter under the skin. "Just how many synapses do you think I can make fire before you come screaming?"

The stomach under his lips hitched with her unbidden gasp. His words curled through her body like slow, unbearable lava.

Pushing up her black camisole to expose her breasts, finally, to his starving gaze made his mouth flood. Rounded and smooth, nipples that matched her lips tight in the cool air, fitted just right to her stature and frame. In that moment, a Navy Seal team could have burst into the house, and Jedikiah's eyes would have stayed fixed on those fucking perfect tits.

In the world there were 'ass men' and 'breast men'. Jedikiah considered himself a subscriber to both tribes. He'd adored Stern's ass for as long as he'd known her... but these tributes to femininity? God-he-didn't-believe-in, this woman would be the death of him. "Fucking hell, Stern," he rasped, lipping around one nipple with a watering mouth. "If I'd known you were hiding these, I'd have sussed you out months ago."

Stern's cheeks were a flaming magenta, caught between embarrassment at his prolonged admiration and heady arousal. At the sharp coil of pleasure at the touch of his mouth, her fingers twitched. She bit her lip, unable to speak for confliction.

"Cat got your tongue, Stern?" Jedikiah asked. He wrapped his lips around one pebbled bud, sucking firmly, rolling the tip rapid-fire with his tongue. That got a reaction.

The paranormal cried out, hands flying up to land on his head: pulling him close or pushing him away, he wasn't sure, and neither was she. "Oh shit, pl -(a bitten-off plea, now, that simply wouldn't do) hnn! - Jed, hah too much!"

The blonde popped off her breast smugly, stilling her rocking hips with one hand. "Your hands, Miss Stern," he reminded darkly, causing her to bite her lip and reluctantly reclaim her repose. Sounding like the devil himself, "You don't know 'too much'. I'm going to show you."

Stern gave up holding back her mind with a low moan, falling into his brain like a monsoon rain. Her arousal was still such a coy thing, chased around in her body while it warred with her will, and Jedikiah determined to help her catch it.

He brought her breasts together and lapped wetly at her nipples like a porn star, like she was so much ice cream. Soft, wet inner lips sensitized and rubbed, followed by dexterous fingertips pinching and teasing. He adored their texture, their responsiveness, how he could influence their color with a suckle (red), a thumb (white), a twist (pink).

Stern's body responded with, from Jedikiah's perspective, seemed like argumentativeness: alternately tensing her legs around his hips like trembling tree limbs, tilting her pelvis against Jedikiah's belly with bright bursts of pleasure through his brain (so that was the EEG spikes), or locking jaw and joints in an effort to stave off aforementioned bursts. But over and over, with each creative assault on just her upper body, matter won over mind.

When he sucked hard enough to lift the weighty flesh by the nipple, tugging mercilessly with the vacuum of his mouth, she bounced around his mind like a rubber ball and a moan rolled from her throat like thunder.

Jedikiah reckoned he ought be more worried: he was playing with psychic fire, literally spritzing gasoline on a flame. A more sensible man would not be doing this. A reasonable individual would not be enamored with a paranomal's uncontrollable mental surges permeating his mind like steam fizzing from a lidded pot.

But, as his good brother had often told him, Jedikiah was far from normal.

The paranormal was noisy, for someone who didn't say a word. She seemed determined to channel every fervent word back into herself, which, in essence, meant Jedikiah received intermittent updates on his progress.

\- _ucking HELL where did he learn that?!_

_...Please don't do that again, too much, toomuchtoohot PLEASE..._

_...Oh God, not teeth, I'll come right here, nonononono -_

"Having trouble, Stern?" Jedikiah whispered over one hard nipple, catching her green-rimmed eye commandingly. "Don't you dare come yet. I'm not nearly through with you."

She tossed her head and whimpered, fucking whimpered like a woman brought to the brink of insanity, all by his mouth and hands alone. At his behest, she turned on her own body and started to fight the electric tightness in her loins, staving off the inevitable because _he said so_. Jedikiah was, in that moment, prouder of that accomplishment than all his degrees combined. _Teeth are a problem for you, huh?_ he thought, perusing the hollow of her slightly sweaty throat. _Let's test that, shall we?_

He exhaled back down to her spit-slick breast and lightly, experimentally, grazed his teeth over her pink bud.

Laura Stern very nearly bucked him off her, a loud and shocked shout leaving her lips as her neck arched. For the briefest moment, Jedikiah was Stern, and he felt her internal muscles convulse in the false start of a climax that made his cock echo the sensation. Jedikiah slammed his hands to the table before they tightened in unbidden response and caused bruising. For a few mindless seconds, all he could do was grind hard into her body instinctively, shamelessly, until their psyches untangled again. "You," he gasped, chuckled, prayed. "Are a live wire."

"Please, Jed," she whispered, implored, bringing him back. Not broken, but certainly cracked. She'd managed to say 'please.'

Jedikiah was mean when it suited him. "Tell me what you want, Stern," he demanded in a growl.

"I... I want to finish. Please, I can't take any more." As dignified a beg as he'd ever heard. Certainly the prettiest.

The EEG was jerkily staying in the middle to high-middle range. He had a notion of what would push it higher. "I want you to watch me go down on you."

Her eyes widened. The words wrenched a hitching half sob of blank-brained desire from her body, and a needle-sharp spike on the EEG that also raced down his cock. "Please, Jed!"

"Please what, Stern?" he teased heartlessly.

"Please... please kiss me."

That stunned the Ultra man to stillness, hovering over her face, his emotions too sudden to hide. Kissing was what lovers did. They weren't lovers. They were combatants, soul-leaching white-collars with axes to grind and secrets to keep. He had a cruel streak and she had a soft spot. People like them, in positions like this, did not kiss.

She was at that crossroads of this bizarre, contrived, convoluted relationship with her hand on the turnpike, waiting for him to catch up. He wasn't there yet. He wouldn't swallow her honesty and feed her a lie in return.

Laura Stern lay on her own kitchen table, slack and waiting for him to process the request, the look in her eyes knowing he'd just as soon jeer at her as fulfill. Jedikiah closed his mouth, upon realizing it had fallen open as he went offline. "No," he said.

The dejection on her face was almost too much to bear.

"Not yet," Jedikiah amended, holding her gaze steadily. "When I'm inside you for the first time... then." That gave him time to sort himself out, to track her steps to that turnpike and hopefully have the gumption to make a choice. He was under no illusions: a choice would be required of him.

"You promise?" she asked. Because this air shared between them was suitable for growing promises.

"I promise," Jedikiah replied. "Now... look at me. Don't stop." He pressed a kiss that now felt like a cruelty to her sternum (hah! a bone named after her, to cover her eternally woundable heart). "Don't stop," he repeated, softer, pressing another over her diaphragm.

"I've never - !" she whimpered in a rush, cut short by a moan of longing and frustration. There was a tremble of her arms like she wanted to reach down and stop his descent.

"Hmm?" Jedikiah said from the level of her navel, nipping lightly around her bellybutton.

Stern bucked sharply once, to get his full attention, and pegged him with wild and slightly lost eyes. "No one's ever gone down on me before," she managed in an embarrassed whisper. "If we're still on the delay game, you might be setting me up for failure."

Jedikiah caressed her thigh in acknowledgement, though his face showed disbelief. "Not even once?" he asked incredulously.

Stern shook her head, cheeks flaming. The electrode helmet drifted slightly off-axis.

Jedikiah's consternation was written all over his face. "How the hell..." he blustered. "Did your last boyfriend have a damned head injury?"

Stern choked on a laugh, though it was strained. "He was rather a vanilla fellow. They all were."

"They sure as hell let you blow 'em, right?"

Stern blushed even redder, if possible, and nodded in affirmative.

It was Jedikiah's turn to shake his head. "Morons. Who the fuck wouldn't return the favor?" He slid his hands over her pelvic spurs, miming the hold he would soon firmly take. "Alright, change of rules. You ask permission for the first orgasm. After that, you tell me when you're coming. No holding back."

"After that?" she repeated in a squeak, hope and horror rolled into three syllables.

He smirked up at her with metallic blue eyes. "I did promise you multiples in the car." He rubbed circles with his thumbs over her hipbones. "See what I meant before? I trust you to keep me informed. Do you trust me, Laura?" It slipped from his lips with disturbing ease, her name. It was almost foreshadowing.

A shiver ran up her body, but the reply was unequivocal. "I do." _You said my name,_ she marveled internally, resounding across the gorge.

Jedikiah did not respond because her name had no business on his lips. It implied an intimacy he wasn't certain about. Her eyes held his unwaveringly as he kissed lower and lower, the tug-of-war of their minds at a standstill as their attentive tension built. Jedikiah grasped the waistband of her sweats and worked them down, breath quickening. He wanted this: wanted to be the first to taste her, take her apart with those eyes on him, feel the clench of her insides on his tongue echoed by her mind convulsing around his.

The heady scent of her arousal hit him like a fucking freight train through the black lace, effectively bowling over his thought processes. Her sodden lace panties landed on the floor, and he caught her legs open to resettle between them, pawing his chair underneath him so he was eye-level.

Her sex was naked. He quirked a questioning brow up at her.

"I don't see the point in having only a little," she explained, covering her flaming face. "All or none. I chose none."

Oh, fuck yes. He was going to eat that pussy like the last pussy on earth, and make this oral virgin into an oral freak. Jedikiah cleared his throat because he actually required it to speak. "Hands."

She obeyed quicker this time, much to his satisfaction, but looked a little miserable at the confrontation. Her breath still came rapid.

"I think you made the right choice," he told her in a rough, but no less pleased manly rumble. Really, where the hell did that tone come from? When did he start to care about how she felt?

Scooting the chair forward, he lazily looped one arm under her leg, barring her hips to the table with his forearm, her knee comfortably hooked over his shoulder. His other hand came up to gingerly spread her.

The first brush of his tongue from ass to clit was a sounding mechanism, and it wrenched a startled moan and jerk from Stern. Jedikiah smiled as her hips flexed towards him, followed by a desperate and winded, "Jedikiah!" with every syllable enunciated strainedly.

Sensitivity confirmed, Jedikiah could not restrain his smirk, or his enthusiasm. "Remember the rules. Hold on tight... Laura." Well, hell. In for a penny, in for a pound.

He suckled on her lower lips, frustrating her into ragged moans and open-legged flexes. He traced paths from knee to pussy, skipped her sex completely, and repeated the process on the other side. He tickled the sweet spots over the tendons, where her underwear usually rested. Every touch brought fresh noise from her open mouth, inspired inexperienced movements from her hips. She chased his mouth when he lapped too softly, groaning her desire, a faint sheen of sweat beginning on her skin.

"Please, Jed, please don't tease me!" she begged, bouncing slightly in front of his mouth as he pulled away yet again.

"If you can stay still for sixty seconds," Jedikiah said, teasing her with his hot breath over her tender clitoris. "I'll give you what you want."

Stern nodded frantically, breasts heaving. 

Jedikiah gave her ass a sharp pinch. "Answer me, Laura."

"Yes, yes sir, please!" she gasped, flinching. "Please dear  _God_ my pussy has got a  _pulse._ "

Jedikiah had to chuckle at that. With a glance at the clock on the wall over them, he doubled down.

He gently prodded her hole with his tongue, prompting a sucking breath and a high, thin screech. She shook like a leaf as he barely penetrated her, every muscle in her pelvic floor trying to grasp the slippery intruder, wetness trickling onto the table under her. By the time Jedikiah raised his wet mouth, she'd graduated to a shake so rapid it looked like vibration. "Good girl, Laura," he said, pressing a smiling kiss to her tremulous inner thigh. "Very," another kiss, closer to her pussy. "Very," even closer, right on the top of her mound. "Good girl." And with that, he sealed his lips around her sweet, engorged bud.

Stern's back bowed off the table, and she screamed like she'd been shot. What felt like a sonic boom of pleasure resonated in Jedikiah's psyche, and his answering moan was quieter but no less fervent.

Jedikiah diligently held on, lashing her stiff clitoris with his wet tongue, sucked it in short, devastating bouts. He gave his own moans full reign, for better to vibrate her most sensitive place in his mouth. It was the best torment. Her agonized pleasure was his delight, his craving. And she fed him well. 

Jedikiah found himself clasping his hands together, locking down those flexing hips, forcing her to ride out every torturous wave. _You are_ not, he snarled in the shared space of their minds. _Getting away from me._

Stern managed to sob out, "Please Jed, it's too much,  _please!"_

He popped off forcefully, letting his slow thumb take over as he spoke. "This is punishment, Stern. For lying to me. It's the first of many... and it's barely  _begun._ " He knew she wouldn't be able to come from just clitoral stimulation, especially when she was so deliciously sensitive, borderline pained with every touch. He intended to use it against her. 

She flamed for him as his mouth resumed torturing her sensitive little bud. Her voice cracked with use several times, breaking over various broken moans, feminine cries, and helpless screams. Jedikiah drank in every tortured sound. It took a long time, and Jedikiah was remiss in keeping track, but when he looked up and saw tears running down her cheeks he deemed his punishment complete.

Jedikiah shushed her gently, placing his warm palm flat against her pussy. "Relax, punishment's over. Deep breaths, come on. I'm not gonna move."

It took her a moment to collect her wits, sniffling herself composed. "There you go," Jedikiah crooned. "Not so bad, hmm?"

"No, sir," she agreed softly. Her hands were resting nonchalantly over her breasts, above her nipples, as though in self-comfort. She looked so debauched, so delectably ruined, and he just wanted to take her apart at the seams. 

Jedikiah nodded at her hands. "Give 'em a squeeze," he urged. 

Stern bit her lip and did as bade, and Jedikiah's cock throbbed at the way those soft mounds spilled around her fingers. "Keep going," he said. "Circle your nipples. Slowly."

She whimpered as her fires began to stoke again, pussy wetting, warming, and pillowing against his palm. She dared not rock her hips into his motionless touch for fear of inciting movement, which was just what Jedikiah wanted. He watched through his mind's eye as she slowly refocused on her pleasure, gradually rose to his call. To observe her light up was a beautiful thing, and he enjoyed watching her pleasure herself. It was her body: she knew how best to tease it. He'd have to harness that and make a longer game of it when he wasn't so eager to see her come. 

"Now," Jedikiah continued. "Pinch your nipples once, hard."

Stern moaned and couldn't help the instinctive buck of her hips, which stimulated her renewed pussy. The feeling stole her breath for a glorious second, and her eyes brightened, a surprised expression crossing her face.

Jedikiah smiled. "Feels good?"

She sighed in ecstasy. "Yes Jed, feels really good."

"Didn't expect to recover so fast, did you?"

She grinned and giggled. "No, I certainly did not!"

"You're gonna come for me, Laura," he instructed, removing his soaked palm

Stern choked out a whine as he latched onto her pussy, lapping from hole to clit in slow, measured strokes. She twitched every time he brushed her love button, but in combination with the alternative pleasure she was moaning quickly, hips gently moving to meet his repetitive licks. It was the razor's edge of too much; but she seemed to adore riding that edge and Jedikiah couldn't have been more pleased. 

He found their respective mental presences much less respective than last time. Stern was positively wild in his mind, dashing hither and yon like a ricocheting bullet. Good. She deserved every ounce of craze he could inflict upon her: for her secret-keeping, her tempting ways, her damnable sass...

Sounding incredulous at her own body's reaction, she panted little, "Ah, ah, ah," sounds as he experimented between vaginal and clitoral stimulation. Most women Jedikiah had pleasured had a preference, and made it known. Not so with this oral virgin. She seemed wrecked by anything he did.

The wax play had constituted mid-range feedback on the EEG. His breast worshipping had been lower high range. With his tongue wriggling as deep as he could reach inside her, Jedikiah managed a glance over her shaking thigh to see the EEG pinned at three measly notches below the highest readout.

A shift of his eyes found her head up, but her eyes had fallen shut and her mouth had rounded in abandon. _Eyes open, Stern,_  Jedikiah remanded, tracing the outside of her clenching hole with the tip of his tongue.

Stern opened her eyes and brought all the fullness of their emotion to bear in one breathtaking moment. She was surprised he was so good at this (though her opinion was slanted, admittedly). What's more, she was shocked at how insanely good it felt, at how deeply into the bond they'd fallen.

Eyes were the windows to the soul, after all.

Jedikiah felt the same sickening lurch in his brain as when she'd cleared his rainy vision in the car, and suddenly, he was inside of her mind.

His mind was a landscape of rocks: shades, textures, and cuts all differing, wherein she could flow amongst like water. Stern's mind was water: faultless and flooding and sensorily smooth. Jedikiah felt rocked like the ocean was cradling him, smothered like it was covering him, and thrilled by the thought of whatever lay in the dark depths, eyeing his feet hungrily.

Stern moved like a selkie in her water: sleek and graceful and bearing canine teeth. _Laura,_ she corrected him, rubbing against his mind like sealskin (spotted in the same places as her freckled back). _Call me Laura._

Jedikiah resurfaced with a gasp, inhaling afresh the smell of her arousal, to find her still staring at him. His defenses had crashed in his absence, and his emotions were parading themselves before her. Try as he might to rectify the barriers than kept them two, separate, imbalanced in power to his benefit, it was like trying to stack sand.

Their bond was growing stronger with their prolonged exposure.

"Jedikiah," Stern whispered, drawing him from his (their?) thoughts. "Please don't stop..." She was regressing from the edge, and chagrinned to see it go. Even if it meant giving him her pleas, she wanted climax more than she valued her pride.

The Ultra man bent back to his task automatically, and had to stifle another gasp at the sensations booming through his body. Her pleasure was a hot cauldron in her stomach, coiling tightly down the wet sheath of her cunt and even more tightly down her clitoris, wrapping around the base of her spine much like his own. To suddenly have an acute understanding of the incredible amount of pleasure receptors, nerves, and muscles that contributed to a woman's heat was humbling, both as a man and a scientist.

In a matter of seconds, his act of domination turned into something dangerously intimate.

The EEG was still pegged.

Jedikiah pawed blindly in his pocket for his ace in the hole and found it: a small silver bullet vibrator. He had to finish this before it became to much to handle. Clicking on the vibrator, he held it against Stern's clit.

The woman's spine bowed off the table and she yelled hoarsely, quickening tighter and tighter, spiraling higher. The EEG started an ascent into the machine's upmost range.

Jedikiah felt like his brain was psionically squeezed even as his tongue was clenched in her wet channel.

"Please Jed, please sir, may I come?" Stern gasped, holding onto the edge by her fingernails.

There was no stopping her name. _Come for me, Laura. Right now._

"Oh," she whimpered, warning and wonder wrapped in a monosyllable. "Oh, oh, OH - !"

The Ultra man felt the detonation start in the furthest recesses of her cunt, rippling up to his tongue, clamping and massaging as Stern howled on the table. He was mildly surprised to find an accompanying burst of sweet fluid painting his face in her throes. The wildfire progression of the climax to her clitoris robbed him of breath. It made his forehead land on her pubic bone and his mouth drop open, his own climax arcing from his body like lightening.

Stern wasn't done. Remarkably, Jedikiah maintained his hold on her hips, keeping her pinned to the table and prompting the howl to turn to a scream as she was unable to vent the maddening sensation of overwhelmedness. She was forced to endure every second of gut-rending orgasm.

Psychically, she thrashed him to pieces. Jedikiah felt like an unsecured passenger in the car wreck of his mind, thrown around by the force of nature that milked climax from his body mercilessly.

His orgasm rode the wave of hers. To have the mental echoes of a woman's climax resound through his male body was, in a word, shredding. His cock wasn't built for the pleasure (though he would be damned if he refused it). His balls felt suctioned like a fucking Hoover. Delicate muscle groups he was only aware of in these few and far-between moments shrieked for mercy. His brain balked even as it was dragged through the razorwire field of unrelenting, powerful peak.

Pulsing like post-nova stars, they fell together.


	11. Chapter 11

Jedikiah's brain was offline from his body, so he noted Stern sliding from his mind like a wave off the beach, fading from his rocky shores in the wake of their climaxes. It felt like two planets breaking orbit, hurtling to opposite corners of the galaxy. She took with her the insane little aftershocks of her body that echoed through his unfitting parts, and he was somewhat grateful. It left Jedikiah alone in his mind to run diagnostics on his orgasm-fatigued body, twitching cock, empty-like-never-before balls, and the echoing vastness of his mind sans Stern.

But damn, he hadn't come that hard since highschool. It this was major leagues second base, third base might literally kill him.

Stern's gasping was moving her stomach, which was in turn moving Jedikiah's head. The movement was what urged the Ultra man out of recovery, and when he raised his head, his heart's four chambers stuttered out of synch. Stern's face was a study in afterglow, abask in slack-jawed descent that was even more pronounced than her tea-steeped serenity. She was wholly different from the person on red-soled heels that stalked Jedikiah's office and dreams: childishly loose in repose, soft with amazement, delighted in the tiny bursts of her nerve endings as she came down from the high.

And fuck, if it didn't tear Jedikiah in two. He was completely unprepared for this observation, or the feeling it garnered. He lusted for the woman in grey and sharply toned mannerisms: but the woman laying on this kitchen table inspired something so alien in the craigs of his heart, Jedikiah did not recognize the feeling.

He could guess, though. He wasn't a fool. He was, however, fundamentally and stubbornly adverse.

Not to mention pissy when he was bowled over by emotions.

"Look sharp, Stern," he crooned. "Round two."

The slip of his fingers into her still-spasming body made her shudder-gasp and come rudely back to earth. "Aw, come on!" she whined sluggishly. "I got you off, what more do you want?"

Jedikiah curled his fingers and pressed just so, seeking in tiny circles that spot that would make her -

Stern whooped in shock as Jedikiah's quest struck gold, nearly jackknifing off the table at the touch to her g-spot. He shoved her back down, laying his forearm down her torso for leverage with his hand grasping her chin.

"For someone in and out of my head," Jedikiah commented placidly, eyes unwavering. "You're pretty ignorant of my motivation. I like getting to come, but it's more about what I can _take._ " He leaned closer over her, both to pin and to bring his point home. "You screwed up, taking me over with you. I would have fucked you and left it at that, like I wanted." Slow, maddening circles on that sweet spot alternated with firm tap-pulls, making even the ridges of his fingerprints into weapons bent on taking her apart. "Revenge is a bitch, Stern. Now, all I care to focus on is you."

Stern realized the folly of her miscalculation at the same time she realized that round two was going to be an indomitable doozy. "Shit," she bit out, face contorting as Jedikiah orchestrated her rapidly through her paces. Grasping at his forearm more to ground herself against the tsunami of too-much pleasure, she growled subsonically as his constant assault began to rend her sanity. When she tried to arch her body to dispel the rising tide and found she couldn't, those growls turned borderline frantic. "Jedikiah, let me up this - !"

Her boss extended two fingers into the wet cavern of her mouth, stilling her angry and desperate tongue. Stern snarled around her gag, but valued her life enough not to bite down. As she crested the next plateau like a comet over the horizon, she whined like a puppy and busied her mouth in an attempt to distract herself.

Jedikiah's cock tried valiantly to rise again. "Fuck, Stern," he growled, quickening his fingers. "We're gonna find a use for that mouth, and soon."

Stern maintained the presence of mind to grant him a sultry look, suctioning especially hard, tongue cleverly dancing.

A sudden, assertive knocking from the front door made both the Ultra man and the paranormal freeze on the table. His fingers and her tongue stilled.

"Who's out there?" Jedikiah demanded in a whisper.

Stern hissed poisonously. "You dick! You can't expect me to - " she stopped abruptly, and Jedikiah watched the color fade from her face. "Oh, shit," she breathed. Squirming in earnest now, augmented by clear fright, she managed to peel Jedikiah's arm off her and roll off the table, tugging her clothes into a motion-conducive state. Her legs nearly buckled as they took her weight, but she caught herself on the table. 

"Who is it?" Jedikiah asked, more concerned now.

Stern was digging through the scraps of electronics in her tool tray. "Aha!" she exulted. "You are going to take this," she pressed the repaired watch into his hand, "And go into that pantry," she indicated the slat-doors on the other side of the bar, "And stay there with the utmost. Fucking. Silence."

He was both peeved by her sudden assertiveness and cowed by her radiating fear. "And why would I do that?"

Stern was already hauling him - bodily pulling him by the belt - towards the pantry. "There's no time!" she told him desperately. "Get in!"

Jedikiah planted his feet and snapped, "Not until you tell me who is out there, and how they are more important than - "

Stern gave him a last insistent push, which put Jedikiah inside the pantry. "You'll see soon enough," she replied hollowly. "Just don't. Make. A sound." And with that, she shut the light doors on his face.

Jedikiah dispassionately let his cock wilt. The door flung open long enough for the EEG and his haphazardly repacked duffle to be knocked against his knees, then his button-down flung carelessly to land on his face.

He would demand an explanation at the next possible opening. Possibly accompanied by triplicate paperwork.

If his ire had not doused his fires, then the voice that drifted from the foyer would have. "Ah, Miss Stern."

"Bathory," came the spine-chilling reply from Stern. Jedikiah even stood a little straighter at her tone, though he told himself it was surprise. What was the Founder doing here, now? Nodding to himself, he strapped Stern's watch around his wrist. Ultra's top dog might pick up on him, otherwise.

"Now, is that any way to address your benefactor?" tutted the English accent, civil words wrapped around threatening meaning. "Aren't you going to invite me in?"

"You do not require inviting." Oh, shit. It was really bad when Stern stopped using contractions. How she'd managed to pack up that loose, pleasure-riddled woman who had flung apart in his mind was beyond him. But then, he would have thought knowing how a female orgasm felt was, too.

"Indeed," shot back the Founder smoothly. "I do not."


	12. Chapter 12

Expensive shoes crossed the hardwood of the once-serene livingroom, then the tile of the kitchen. Evidently, the Founder was doing what Jedikiah had done: follow his nose. The pull of baked goods put the Founder within Jedikiah's line of slatted sight.

"For vegan biscuits," the British accent drawled. "These aren't terrible."

"Thank you," came Stern's stiff reply from the kitchen door.

It rankled Jedikiah that the Founder took the same liberties with the work of Stern's hands that he did. The flash of jealousy was bizarre, and uncharacteristic. He wished the woman's watch on his wrist didn't block Stern's subconscious from his mind. He might have coached her on handling Bathory, as he was practiced in (read: removing the man as quickly as possible).

Jedikiah couldn't see her, but he could imagine the rebar hold of her spine, the narrowed neutrality of her expression. It rolled off her like a thick cloud of tension, like the storm pattering its cell edges outside. All that was missing was the skirt and hairstick. She never gave off this much hostility, not even after Jedikiah fingered her on his desk, or fucked with her mind on the couch.

Why?

For some reason, his instincts were screaming at him that something wasn't right. The Founder shouldn't show up at old mentee's homes. And the way Stern had reacted when she'd sensed it was him...

Hell, Jedikiah wished Stern had some protection for her radiating brain, but she'd given it to him. What did it mean that she'd rendered herself mostly defenseless in the face of peril, only for his sake?

"Did you come here to eat," Stern broke the silence, "Or can we get this over with? It happens to be my day off."

The Founder tutted with recalcitrance. "Come now, Laura," he chided. "I can't check up on my favorite pet project?"

Jedikiah bit back a flinch of surprise. Pet project? What was that supposed to mean? He could feel his ire giving way to outright anger, boiling under his skin.

"I am not your pet," spat Stern icily, mirroring her boss's fury.

There were three sharp footsteps, and Stern's grunt of mild pain. "You are," hissed Bathory, gripping her jaw and forcing her head up. "Whatever I say you are. Pet project, experiment - it doesn't matter. I own you."

Jedikiah was seconds away from bursting out of the pantry and taking a swing at the Founder. His vision was starting to tinge red. Nobody pushed his secretary around. Well, except him.

Stern jerked her face out of the man's grasp. "Well go on, then," she goaded, stiff as a board, defiant as an eagle's eye. "Try me, motherfucker."

Bathory's eyes narrowed even as Jedikiah's went wide with an impressed smirk. When Stern forwent contractions _and_ started swearing at you, you were fucked.

The wash of mental presences over his mind felt like the sun painting the atmosphere in aurora borealis. Stern's mind was toe-to-toe with the Founder's, twisting and pushing against each other like animals seeking purchase for claws and teeth. Jedikiah's hand fisted over his watch bound wrist, unspeakably grateful the dampener was keeping the chaotic psionic firefight mostly out of his head.

Bathory momentarily corralled Stern, and his mental voice thundered like concert bass in Jedikiah's head. "Make coffee," he commanded. The innocuous echo of his physical voice stood starkly contrasting.

"No," Stern replied, just as evenly. She slithered from his grasp like water.

Jedikiah was befuddled for a long moment. Why coffee? He recalled Bathory commenting that Stern never made him coffee throughout her entire internship with him. Jedikiah himself had demanded Starbucks, only to be refused. Only after being thrashed by that child-breakout-hoarder had Stern deigned to brew a cup for Jedikiah.

It came into clarity with a nearly audible snap. Stern only made coffee for her superior when she wanted to, and never when ordered, because of what Bathory was doing right now.

Clearly, this confrontation occurred frequently enough to form a hardcore ball of stony refusal in Stern's heart, from which stemmed her strength to fight the Founder now.

Jedikiah peeked between the slats again, almost expecting the two opponents to have their fingers to their temples. Instead, he saw them standing fairly still, glaring at each other blankly, eyes unfocused in their argument. Jedikiah wasn't worried: Stern had clearly faced this before, and hadn't exuded any fear about doing it again. Any paranormal who could project twenty miles would come out on top, period. Jedikiah felt safe in his bet.

When Stern gasped and lurched towards the countertop, his heart lurched, too.

"Make coffee," urged Bathory blandly, fingers twitching at his sides.

Stern sneered, righted herself. "No."

The Founder's lips twisted, and Jedikiah felt the double-down of his oppressive mental powers like a weight. "Make. Coffee," he ground out.

"No," Stern replied with gritted teeth. A vein pulsed in her forehead.

"Make coffee."

"Fuck. You." Another lurching step.

"Make coffee!" commanded the Englishman.

Jedikiah wasn't even in the fight, and he was starting to sway. _Hold on, Stern._

Stern snarled, bracing her hands on the countertop as though keeping them from reaching for the canister of beans, sitting innocently on the granite.

"I know you fight me because you despise me," the Founder remarked, the snake in Eve's ear. "For good reason: I tried to depower you. And though I find it useful in honing my own faculties, and testing the limits of our species, if you would only let me in of your own volition - "

"Not gonna happen!"

" - we might come to an understanding." Bathory took a confident step to tower over the bent woman. "I want to understand you. You are a missing link between Sapiens and Superiors!" He leaned slowly closer to her ear, covering her body in a twisted parody of Jedikiah's advances, framing her back to his front against the countertop. "Let. Me. In."

The mental pressure reached a fever pitch, scratching at Jedikiah's brain like insects. He could only imagine what it was like without a dampener. Stern's next move baffled him.

"You want in?" panted Stern. "Fine." And that was when Stern struck. Jedikiah felt her psyche fling open like a pnuematic seal. Her mind coiled around Bathory's, and she opened the ocean of her consciousness to him, dragging him into her deepest waters as he took a gasp of shock. Jedikiah balked at the yawning plummet he could sense through the afforded peephole: he'd only been dumped into a calm bay, by comparison. The Founder and the secretary struggled like a giant squid and a blue whale in the darkest fathoms of the sea, physically jerking apart even as they cleaved together. 

While Jedikiah grinned and silently cheered on his secretary, his inner scientist was going to town on a chalk board. He surmised from the Founder's gasp that he had never been so deeply in Stern's mind, and that it startled him. Secondly, Jedikiah gleaned that Stern's mind was fundamentally different from that of other telepaths, which he hazarded was because Stern was a single-T paranormal.

Thirdly, exposure to this mutant mind was clearly uncomfortable for a run-of-the-mill paranormal; ergo, logically, it was torturous for one so powerfully sensitive as Bathory. Stern intended to drown her opponent out.

At that moment, Jedikiah wanted to perform science all over Stern's body.

"NO!" barked Bathory, redoubling his efforts to escape Stern's grip. He sounded pained, starting to panic. Jedikiah wondered what it might feel to be clasped in the thorny tentacles and sharply beaked maw of a squid, when he had only been brushed by a selkie.

"Tap, snap, or nap, Bathory," ground out the secretary.

Bathory beat a hasty retreat back into his own skull, taking the oppression filling the room with him. He staggered back a step as Stern moaned softly, sagging against the countertop.

"Extraordinary. Such power encased in such weakness." With a sneer, the Founder straightened his tie. "Yet another draw," he sighed sourly. "It looks like we'll have to continue this another day. Just remember, Laura Stern: I may not be able to depower you, but I can still take you apart. By the time I grow tired with our game, it will be far to late for you." With that, he strode from the room, slamming the front door behind him.

Jedikiah broke cover immediately, coming to Stern's side just as she slid to the floor. "Hey, hey, easy there. What's wrong?"

"Nothin,'" replied Stern softly, tears spilling as an afterthought from beneath heavy lids. "I just need to rest. For a minute." She sounded drained, adrift.

Jedikiah crouched next to her, stroked a slice of hair from her face. "If you need rest, take it. I've got you."

A gentle flicker of a smile lifted her lips as she breathed, "I know you do..."

Although he was dying to question her further, he relented. The scientist watched the impossibly strong woman sink into unconsciousness. He gathered her ungainly body against his and carried her down the hall, finally finding her bedroom. He chuckled briefly at her four-posted queen bed with muslin curtains, because it was so damn girly and at odds with the stone woman Stern portrayed in the workplace.

He laid her on the mattress, arranged her limbs, then put his own hands on his hips with a heartfelt sigh. Finally, his own emotions came to bear. "Woman, I swear..." he murmured. He was mad she lied. First she'd kept her powers from him, then she'd kept this sick matching of wits with the Founder a secret. That was what pissed him off the most.

Jedikiah adjourned momentarily to lock the front door (noting his shoes had been hastily stuffed under the sofa) before coming back to the bedroom to face the choice: bed or chair? There was an oversized reading chair in white-on-white damask that looked pretty comfortable. But then, the bed was ideal. The only problem was if it was proper for him to... Oh, fuck it. He lay down beside the sleeping Stern, exactly six inches from her. She was just as peaceful in sleep as under the influence of tea, only more boring.

Jedikiah's immediate reaction to boring was to make to-do lists.

1\. Punish Stern for lying.

2\. Question Stern further regarding said lies.

3\. Finally have actual intercourse with Stern. They were both cleared, and he was hungry to have the body that lay loose and lovely next to him. Possibly more hungry than he'd ever been for a simple body, but he would be damned it he squinted to find out why.

Being the talented manager he was, Jedikiah began to consolidate the three tasks into one. Multitasking was a skill he excelled in. His creative mind started to churn out ideas for the combination of his directives, each more sensual than the last, for when his secretary would awaken.

Jedikiah had sworn to make Stern pay for keeping secrets from him. And now, she had added another to the pile. For a woman with three degrees, she could be remarkably naive in underestimating him.

When Stern started to change pattern in her breathing, Jedikiah set to work. "Laura," he called quietly. "Wake up, sunshine."

Stern's brow furrowed as she chased slumber, but Jedikiah's movements drove it beyond her grasp. "'Sunshine?'" she echoed dryly, sleepily. "Really?" Eyes still closed, she made to swat at the sensation tickling her, but found she could not. Those eyes flew open to find her hands tied to the headboard with Jedikiah's silk sash, naked save for underwear and bra, and being lightly brushed with a thin vibrator.

"Now what are you doing?" she groaned, shifting as Jedikiah circled her bellybutton with the wand.

"Remember how I said I would be punishing you for lying to me?" Jedikiah said conversationally, tracing the outline of her bra. "When, how, and where I wanted?"

Stern wriggled, testing the knots. "Vaguely. You had me pinned to a couch, at the time."

Even waking, Stern was smooth on the uptake. Jedikiah couldn't have been prouder, though he schooled his tone and face to aloofness. "And knowing that, you went and kept yet another secret from me: Bathory's hold on you."

"Ah, yes," Stern replied, hips flexing faintly as Jedikiah traced the outline of her panties. "I was going to tell you, I swear I was."

"And if you had before I found out, your punishment might have been lessened. As it stands, though," Jedikiah whispered into the shell of her ear, "You're in for it, now."

Stern's flesh goosepimpled and she sucked a sharp breath. Half-asleep was a susceptible state for sexual intention, and Jedikiah knew every touch was a breath on the coals of her heat.

"I have to admit, you threw me for a loop when you asked me to kiss you," Jedikiah continued, outlining Stern's nipple through the lace with the vibrator. Stern blushed as her moment of vulnerability was brought up. Jedikiah used the wand to turn her face to him, eyes predatory. "That won't be a problem this time. Our game was interrupted, but now, I expect my rules to be obeyed. Got it?"

Stern swallowed. "Can you reiterate the rules?"

Jedikiah's cock twitched at the submissiveness in her voice, at so small a demonstration of her want to please him. "No coming until I say. After the first orgasm, you tell me when you're coming. Red light stops everything, yellow means a break, and green is go." He ran the wand down her ribs, relishing her ticklish flinch. "But since this is punishment, you only get a red light. Good girls earn rewards like breathers. Now, repeat the safewords."

The trussed woman was wide awake now. "Red means stop, yellow means break, and green is go."

Jedikiah rewarded her by popping her breasts free of her cups with a smile. He drew an ever-tightening circle around her breast as she found voice again, albeit slightly strained. "May I ask what my punishment will be?"

"No," Jedikiah replied blithely, tapping the wand to the tip of her nipple studiously. "But the first act is for hiding your powers from me."

Stern pouted at being denied the information, so Jedikiah traced the seal of her pursed lips with a dark chuckle. "It's going to be pretty obvious, pretty quick."

"If you're expecting me to beg forgiveness, I won't," Stern declared evenly against the tip of the wand. "My business is my business. And I'm not afraid of whatever you're gonna dish out. If I can survive the first month under you management, I can take anything."

"If you insist."

The secretary allowed the vibrator past her lips after a few seconds' contemplation, eyeing her captor with a sultry, defiant look that bade him continue.

The Ultra man chuckled around a suddenly dry mouth. "I can't feel you like normal." He tapped the side of her head indicatively and slid the vibrator free for her to answer. "You should be all over me." He tilted his head at her tied hands with a smirk. "So to speak."

"Got kinda tuckered," Stern admitted, blushing. "It'll take a few hours to get back to max power." She glanced away. "He's a heavy-hitter."

"I gathered," Jedikiah replied. He could see the events of the hour previous coming home to roost, and hated that it marred their mutual fun times. But he preferred addressing things in order of occurrence. "And we'll get to that, I promise." Jedikiah took the watch off his wrist. "No need for this, then."

Stern grinned nervously. "I'm grounded, for the moment."

Her boss grinned back wolfishly, and was rewarded with a shiver. "You're telling me." He slid one socked foot up the inside of her calf, simultaneously drifting the wand up her neck. "There is one choice you get to make for this scene."

"Scene," Stern repeated softly. She disregarded the frame of reference she had for the word, in favor of being taught its true definition. "What's the choice?"

Jedikiah gently traced the delicate skin of her eyelids with the wand, chasing them closed. "The nature of this punishment will be new to you, so you have the option of blindfold, or no blindfold."

Stern chewed her lip thoughtfully, making Jedikiah determined to make her do it under his design. He could see the wheels of her brain turning. She'd really enjoyed the blindfold earlier in the day. But then, the look in Jedikiah's eyes was enough to make both heat and butterflies blossom in her belly.

"It is a punishment, Laura," Jedikiah reminded, voice dropping. "It will be hard. That's a promise."

The secretary shifted with a heat-filled exhale at his use of her name. "Will it hurt?" she asked, quiet with worry and flickering large eyes to his.

Jedikiah had a feeling he was being played, but relented just in case. "Depends on your definition of pain. By normal standards, not unbearably so."

Stern considered. "I liked the blindfold last time, but... not this time, I think." She tugged her restrained hands as though in explanation. "One thing at a time, you know?"

Jedikiah nodded, casually hooking one leg between hers and placing the wand on the bed. "Honestly, I was hoping you'd say that." He reached under the coverlet. "Because your face when you see this - "

Stern went saucer-eyed as he showed his hand.

" - priceless."

"You, you cannot be serious," squeaked Stern, legs clamping shut on Jedikiah's knee.

"Oh, but I am," he replied gleefully. "And let me tell you, I am thrilled you know enough about this to be afraid." He flicked the button on the Hitachi, letting the powerful hum fill the air. Jedikiah felt unreasonably cheated without the mental butterflies of Stern's presence.

"Tell me," Jedikiah started, blazing a light, glancing, slow trail down Stern's body. "Bathory said he was the one to try to depower you. You claim you tried to do it to yourself. Which is it?"

Stern was squirming, trying to dislodge Jedikiah's knee from between hers to no avail. A buzzing tap to her clit made her gasp and shudder. "Ah! H-he did it when he realized he couldn't break into my mind."

"When was that?" Another electric tap.

"When he first! interviewed me for a secretary position."

"So when the serum failed to render you normal, he decided to keep you around," Jedikiah surmised thoughtfully, grazing Stern's clit. "You realize the only reason you're not pinned to a dissection board is because the mind is a nontangible thing, right?"

"I do," forced out Stern, hands fisting. "And the only reason I'm not rotting in the Citadel is because I'm a _challenge._ " She spat the word distastefully.

Jedikiah traced Stern's inner thighs lightly while he mulled this. How many times had Bathory invaded Stern's home while she worked for Jedikiah, done this to her? How many times had Jedikiah remanded Stern for what had been signs of trauma, barely hidden? Without his bidding, his shriveled heart was tugged. Stern had been living under the thumb of a dangerous psychopathic speciesist for years. She'd built a career knowing that, with a single order, her current existence could be taken from her.

"Why did you stay at Ultra?" Jedikiah asked, removing the Hitachi entirely.

Stern sagged slightly as the stimulation left her. "Because... as much as Bathory wants to 'understand' me, I want to understand me, more." She looked at him, an iceberg's tip of desperation shining in her eyes. "I have so many damn questions, Jedikiah."

Good to know he wasn't the only one. "If I offered to help you find answers," he said slowly. "Would you see me as Bathory's replacement?"

Stern's expression went cryptic as she considered for a few long minutes. "I trust you more than Bathory," she replied finally. "Can you believe that? I trust my blackmailer! Well, exblackmailer." 

"You thought I'd collude with him, if I knew he knew, didn't you?" Jedikiah surmised. 

"Do you wanna let me up to talk about this, please?"

"Not really."

Stern didn't break conversational stride and looked appropriately ashamed. "I'm sorry I thought so little of you."

"Just what did you expect me to do?" asked Jedikiah incredulously.

"I didn't know what to think!" Stern exclaimed, leaning closer to Jedikiah's face, desperate to make him understand. "But do you understand what position I'm in?! I can't run, he would find me. And if he finds out you know, he'll make you his puppet, too. You have no idea how  _sick_ this bastard is! He'd fucking watch you, make you torture me like you do those breakouts. I'd be a lab rat, a fuck doll, a goddamn used and broken plaything!" 

Jedikiah hissed, planting a hand in her hair. "That would  _never_ happen, do you understand me Laura Stern? I would put a bullet in my brain before I let Bathory make me rape anyone, do you hear me?" He gave her head a little shake. "DO you hear me?"

Stern had the good grace to look sheepish, and remorseful. After a laden pause, she said, "I told those lies before I got to know you. Before I saw who you were - " she craned to press a kiss to his forehead. "-here. I'm _sorry,_ Jedikiah."

Jedikiah sighed. "Yeah, well, I didn't exactly help my own case, did I?"

"Since the Founder knows about me, it's not really blackmail anymore, is it?"

Jedikiah barked a laugh. At the breakneck rate their precarious relationship was developing, he was almost glad to see the coercion aspect of it go. "Yeah, now all I have to do is keep my guard up, so he doesn't find out. Because I have no powers to remove, he'd probably rather remove my heartbeat."

"Believe it or not, you are tough to get a casual read on," Stern asserted brightly. "You're more closed-off than most."

Jedikiah pressed the buzzing Hitachi to Stern's clit, earning a series of startled yelps like a kicked dog. "Flattery will get you nowhere, Laura."

Stern's hips twisted, trying to dislodge the direct stimulation with a whimper.

"Never used one of these, huh?" Jedikiah queried with a grin, flicking the vibrations up another notch.

"What do you think?!" Stern snapped, arm muscles in stark relief as she strained. A familiar series of, "Oh!" began to issue from her mouth.

Jedikiah removed the wand quickly and smacked her pussy hard enough to mean business, halting her orgasm in its tracks. "I know you weren't about to come without permission, Laura."

She flung back her head in frustration. "Maybe I don't want to ask."

Jedikiah eyed her critically in silence for a moment. Stern was clearly working through some frustrations, probably to do with Bathory. Jedikiah could help her (in a decidedly nontraditional manner): what sort of boss would he be if he didn't? Fight fire with fire. Conveniently, his first round of punishment fit the bill.

"Ever heard of edging?" Jedikiah asked nonchalantly.

Stern's head whipped around comically fast. Oh, she definitely had. "I think," Stern replied snidely, "That once I get back to full speed - "

Jedikiah cut her off with ten seconds of the highest setting, right on her clit. Her legs were twitching when he withdrew.

"Fuck," she bit out.

"We will," he promised.

"If I don't tell you I'm close, and my mind's in blackout, then just how are you to know?" challenged Stern.

Jedikiah gave her a condescending look. "Seeing as you've come twice for me, I think I'll manage to head you off just fine." He readjusted his thigh deeper between hers. "But you'll get tired of being stubborn long before I do. Remember: good girls get rewards."

The real question was when would Stern's want for release, in its physical and metaphysical forms, supersede her stubbornness? Her need was evident, glistening on the tip of the Hitachi, between her legs, in her eyes. The ghost of Bathory could be silenced with climax, Jedikiah was sure. It would free Stern's mind and body.

And they were off. Jedikiah started at the lowest setting, which he could tell Stern found frustrating after having experienced full-bore only a minute previous. Gentle swirls against her clit, light pressure against her vagina, working strokes up beneath her clitoral hood for that extra, electric kick. He took advantage of her exposed breasts after unclasping the bra and moving it up her tethered arms: tentative rolls of her nipples, tracing her aereolas, tugging them in rapid pulses, even putting the Hitachi on them when the heat grew too much.

Over and over, he brought her to the edge of coming, only to infuriatingly back off just beneath the threshold of her peak.

Stern attempted stoicism. Her game face was adorable because Jedikiah knew it would eventually break. Over the course of twenty minutes of increasing pressure, speed, vibrations, and arousal, Stern began to crack.

At first it was little moans that fought their way past her lips. He noted her nipples stayed pebbled, and laved the nearest one like a piece of hard candy, imitating the leisurely pace of the Hitachi between her legs. At her reluctant sounds, he smiled around his mouthful and upped the vibrations.

Stern's little moans snowballed into flexes of her hips when the sensitive underside of her clit was jarred, eventually forgetting herself and chasing the vibrator when Jedikiah removed it. _Come and get it,_ he thought with a grin, moving the Hitachi just beyond her reach and suctioning off her nipple with a pop. "Ask permission, Laura," Jedikiah reminded patiently. "And all this will end."

Stern scowled, her free leg jostling on the coverlet. With a sharp growl, she cried, "Why are the two men in my life assholes?"

Jedikiah blinked. That was a little low, lumping him in with Bathory. Stern was talking slightly out of her gourd, he knew, due to frustration. But then, what was out of the gourd stemmed from what was within the gourd.

That hurt a little more. But there was nothing Jedikiah could do about it except prove Stern wrong.

While Stern was breathing heavily with her eyes tightly shut, teeth gritted, Jedikiah rose and knelt up between Stern's legs like he owned the space there (in fact he did, despite Bathory's claim). His hips were bracketed by long, smooth legs that trembled with misfiring nerves. "I'll make this even easier, Laura," he said, holding the Hitachi on top of her mound for disappointingly muted sensation. "Tell me what you want."

Stern tried in vain to close her legs, arching her back rhythmically to seek or avoid the vibrator, he wasn't sure. "Fuck. You."

And there it was: the same words she'd used under duress with Bathory, used under duress here. The real problem that had been nagging Jedikiah like a fly in his ear loomed into understanding. He removed the Hitachi entirely, putting his hands on the bed at her shoulders so he could stare down into her face. "I'm not him, Laura. Not even close."

An errant tear trickled innocuously from the corner of her eye, unnoticed. "Oh, come on," she said, mistily staring back up at him. "Lie to me, and tell me there aren't any similarities between the situations."

"I won't," Jedikiah replied. "We're both Ultra. We're both scientists. We're both chasing the same answers for your species' future."

"And you both just love control," Stern sighed.

Jedikiah moved one hand to her head level, for better to lean into her space. "My control has a pleasurable purpose," he rejoined confidently. "If given a chance."

Stern held his gaze silently for a long minute, mentally dark but optically alight. "Ask me again," she prompted quietly.

"What do you want?" Jedikiah breathed.

"I want to come. Please, let me come."

The Ultra man cradled her face with one hand, thumbing the wet tear track. "You got it."


	13. Chapter 13

When directed, Stern stared right into Jedikiah's eyes as he rubbed her pussy slowly. The heat rising there matched his own, and they fed off each other. He brought the Hitachi back to her clit and pressed one long finger into her overwet body, then two, rubbing her upper wall on the slow withdrawal and pushing deep with each thrust. Her eyes fell closed under a furrowed brow, over an open mouth.

Within thirty seconds, she whispered, "I'm close."

He thumbed the vibrations up slightly, quickened his fingers. "I love this," he murmured, forcing himself not to trip over the l-word. "Seeing you driven to the edge. I want to keep you right here, forever, slick and needy."

Stern could only whimper in response, arching under the heady caress of his voice. After twenty more seconds, "Jedikiah, please."

He maintained stoically, waiting for it.

Ten more seconds later, she opened her eyes. The Ultra man took his cue.

Jedikiah amped the vibrations to the roof, pressed and rubbed hard on one square inch of internal space. "Come right now, Laura," he ordered in a primal growl.

It was hyperbolic, sharp and sweet and insane. Stern bowed off the bed, voice caught in her throat belying the stillborn scream. Jedikiah felt himself smiling as he continued to rub and was rewarded with a flood of fluid.

Taut as a bowstring, she came for a solid half-minute before he let her down.

Experimentally, he leaned down and sank his teeth into her inner thigh, tap-pulled again firmly, only to have Stern start orgasming again. "You and the teeth thing," he chuckled as she bucked.

Her muteness broke with a sob when she crested hard. "Jed-i-ki-ah!"

"One more for the road," he replied silkily. He suck-bit her left nipple, and she convulsed around his fingers with a fresh burst of fluid.

"No, no, no, I can't," she chanted, wailing as he forced her through the end of one climax roughly to start on another.

"You're gonna give me one more," he declared darkly, relishing her wild writhing, how she jerked on her bonds.

"I can't, Jed, please!" she cried, trying to shy away from that insistent hand as her knees butterflied on his sides.

"One more," he commanded. He brokered no argument.

Stern whined, the torment being conducted rapidly through painful and back into pleasure. Within a minute of tortured noises and uncooperative hips, Jedikiah brought her to the edge again. He saw his target, her thrown-aside head exposing her neck, and darted in to nip the tight tendon, following up with a wide-fanged bite to the meat of her shoulder.

Stern shrieked like a woman thrown to the stars, legs and pussy and, shockingly, her mind spasming around Jedikiah. The Ultra man gasped a laugh as her mental presence breezed through his body, not quite strong enough to stir him out of control. "There you are," he marvelled, slowing his fingers. "Was wondering when you'd show up."

Stern shuddered and sucked air like a marathoner, small little shouts escaping her lips as she came down from the ride. As she slipped into afterglow, Jedikiah untethered her hands and chafed her wrists, ridding them of their pink, indented bands. "Still with me, Laura?" he asked, smug despite himself.

The puddle of goo on the soaked sheets managed a heartfelt groan, "Jesus Christ."

"You know it's rude to call another man's name in bed," he chided jokingly.

Stern cracked one eye at him with a smile and a weak laugh. "And that's your idea of punishment?"

"Was it as advertised, or were you screaming about something else?" he teased, leaning against the headboard so his hand lay comfortably on her hair.

Stern moaned, stretching her arms. "And then some. But something tells me you aren't done."

"Hardly," he replied, stroking to the nape of her neck. "Once you're out of orbit, we'll start on act two."

The secretary yawned, turning on her side to face his thigh. "I can handle that."

He urged her closer, to lay her head on his leg (he told himself he did it for her sake). She fell into a nap there, and he passed the time by watching the flush fade from her skin. He mulled the development of his emotions, the peace he derived from pushing this woman to the edge, then letting her sleep on him like a child. Jedikiah hypothesized that sexually sating a mate to the point of slumber was a special, caveman-era delight, but in light of yet another twist to their relationship, it felt like more.

Jedikiah couldn't remember the last time he'd felt so damned happy, even though his cock was softening from its understandable state of interest. It had to be his hindbrain talking.

Ten minutes later, Stern stirred at his behest to find herself arranged over his lap. Stern had just enough time to register her ass in the air before Jedikiah's hand fell upon it with a sharp _smack!_

"Hey!" she yelped, brought rudely back to reality.

Jedikiah easily kept her in place with one hand and soothed the red splotch with the other. "You sleep like the dead," he remarked.

Stern huffed a surprised laugh. "I'll say. Or you're just a talented somnophiliac."

He smacked the fleshy globe again, enjoying her hiss. "This isn't work: nothing over three syllables, missy, unless it's my name."

"Buzzkill," she responded without venom. "You gonna tell me what this is for, seeing as we got 'hiding my species' out of the way?"

"This one's for hiding Bathory from me," Jedikiah replied, landing three in quick succession to the opposite cheek.

Stern's hands grasped the coverlet, shoulders rounding. "He's not really in the equation, at the moment."

Jedikiah's heart soared, glad to have freed Stern's mind from its demons. "Good. But speaking of equations, I want you to count for me." _Smack!_

"That wasn't in your fantasy," Stern pointed out, strained.

"It's for science," Jedikiah explained. He ran his hand down her pinked ass, delving shallowly into her wetness with naught but a fingertip. "My, my. Soaked already?"

Stern grumbled, but still chased his prodding fingers as they withdrew.

Jedikiah reached under the coverlet, unseen. "I want to know how many strikes it takes for you to come on this." He rubbed another, thicker vibrator against her still-wet pussy lips, slicking it up, letting her feel the small nubs all along it, its obvious length and girth.

Stern's breath hitched with lust and she made to twist a look over her shoulder, but Jedikiah pushed her head gently to the bed. "Close your eyes," he urged in a rough murmur. "Imagine it."

"I can do one better," she replied huskily.

Jedikiah felt the familiar tickle in the back of his brain and guessed her intent. "Come on in," he said, glad to feel their minds touching once more, even so shallowly as her expended psychic reserves would allow. He could feel her surprise at the depth of arousal these games inspired, and relished such pleasurable discovery. She hadn't known this beast of sexual prowess was inside her, but now, she could sense the creature was integral and there to stay. She harbored a brief worry over who would sate the beast (when he was gone, because they never stayed long), but denied allowing such worry to cloud her pleasure. She was paired for the moment, and that was what mattered.

Stern, in return, mentally took stock of his rocky shores, worn a little smoother from her repeated trespasses. For a moment, Jedikiah was timid to show just how much change she'd wrought in him, how much he had conformed to her watery self, but under her paranormal scrutiny, he had little say in the matter.

A firm _smack!_ to the rounded part of her ass helped distract her.

"Ouch," she said softly, wriggling a little. "Uh, one."

Jedikiah let the tip of the vibe slip in, feeling the resistance of her tightness, despite all. An inch later, the nubs began to slide through clenching muscle, and a moan wrenched its way out of Stern's mouth.

"Like that, do you?" he murmured, withdrawing slightly to press back in slightly deeper.

Stern's back arched, and he felt her refocus on what he was seeing: the plastic phallus sinking slowly into her bare, glistening pussy. In return, he felt what she felt: the suck of her body, the rekindling of cooled nerves, the intoxicating glide of the nubs along her inner walls. Eight inches later, the wand was seated.

Jedikiah preluded his strike with a ghost of a rub on the target skin, then stung it with his open palm. As expected, Stern tightened down on the intrusion and moaned at the elicited feeling of unyielding hardness. "Let's see if you can earn your reward this time, too," Jedikiah challenged. "Thirty spanks. If you don't come during, you get something better. Count." _Smack!_

"Aha - ! Two." Stern didn't have time to dwell on the high number, or fathom her capacity to take such punishment. Jedikiah's promise of 'hard' and 'painful' returned to mind.

He delivered.

Ten strokes in, Stern was whimpering. The repeated hits on the same spot were a bitch, as Jedikiah had both a strong arm and wicked aim. At seventeen, Jedikiah paused to rotate the vibe slowly, torturously, bringing the pain-stymied arousal surging back to life. "Your ass is already cherry red," he informed.

"I can see," Stern griped, panting for both pain and pleasure. She was still patched into his vision.

Jedikiah made sure he was looking away as he twisted the dial on the end of the wand. Vibrations rattled through first Stern, then echoed through Jedikiah, and he bit back an answer to her wanton moan as her pert little ass tipped into the air, giving the wand deeper access.

"Good girl," he murmured. She was responding naturally, as directed. Fully and completely under his sway.

The little bolt of lust at his words didn't go unnoticed. "Remember: reward for waiting." Another notch and the vibrations increased, pairing well with a back-of-the-thigh strike.

"Oh God!" she exclaimed, heartfelt and wanting, but restraining herself. Her fists were full of sheets and jerking with each blow. "Eighteen!"

Jedikiah decided to up the stakes. He began to talk, low and dirty, while redirecting his own arousal straight into her brain like lava down a chute. "Look at that tight little ass, all red for me," he growled, palming both cheeks roughly. "And that hungry little pussy, primed to peak. Didn't know pain could feel good, huh?"

Stern whined, high and needy, undulating on his lap.

 _Smack!_ (A belated whisper of, "Nineteen.") "You're shocked as shit that any of this feels good. You thought you were a vanilla girl, but I had you pegged from day one. Bet you could take bigger. Bet I could tie you down with this inside you for fucking hours, and you'd never stop coming. Just wave after wave after wave." With an index finger, he pushed the buzzing vibe that much deeper, enjoying Stern's moan.

Spanks twenty through twenty-five were landed in quick succession, punctuated with desperate, needy yelps. Jedikiah kissed the apex of one firecracker cheek as he continued, "I would watch you, of course. Jerk off slow as you went over faster and faster. When I was done, I would eat you out while the vibe was on high, just to hear you screaming my name when you soaked my face."

"Fuck, Jed!" barked Stern, stomach tensing across his thighs. "Please!"

Jedikiah popped her twice on the tender underside of her bottom, loving the ripple of the impact. "Three more."

 _Smack!_ "Twenty-eight!" she moaned, grinding fruitlessly down.

 _Smack!_ "Twenty-nine!" A quickening began in her deepest recesses.

Jedikiah brought his hand down, twice as hard, with finality. "Thirty! Oh, oh, oh - !"

He yanked the vibe, sopping wet, out of her and tossed it off the bed. Stern's orgasm derailed as he pulled her upright, her shock and outrage showing as she protested nonsensically.

That is, until she saw him undoing his tented pants, wriggling down the bed. Her face went ravenous, body stunned to stillness.

Jedikiah ripped his pants and boxers down to leave his body exposed, open, cock rockhard and wet at the tip. Stern's mouth dropped open at the sight of him, hunger evident. Her eyes finally found his, and Jedikiah slowly, meaningfully laced his fingers behind his head. The intention for them to stay there was clear across their shared psyche.

He'd taken her control. Now, he was gifting it back.

"You've earned your reward. Go on then," he said, eyes gleaming wickedly. "Have your way with me."

He expected her to climb hurriedly up his body, breasts swaying. He steeled himself as she sat heavily on his cock, moaning in unparalleled delight as he finally, finally slid home in her vice-like wetness for the first time. "Shit, Jed, oh fuck," she gasped, tossing back her head. "O-oh, ow, ow." The twinge of stretch zinged both of their minds.

"Too much?" he asked, feigning nonchalance even as his cock imitated a lightning rod.

She wobbled her head in a negative. "Took you too fast."

The day that ceased to be an ego boost would be the day Jedikiah died. The picture of composure, he ran his hungry eyes up the picture of wanton sex appeal wrapped around his cock, enjoying the view from this angle. Experimentally, he murmured sotto vocce, "I bet I could make you come without moving at all. Just my voice and my mind..." He called to memory the sounds and secondhand sensations of eating her out, how she'd been unable to control her mouth and hips and that surprise burst of sweet fluid. "Can you imagine it? Utterly still, feeling it grow inside you like a tsunami, only to break over your body like a damn train wreck? Imagine pulsing around my cock, no stimulation, just one long, drawn-out - "

Stern's fingernails dug unbidden into his abs, and he cut off with a grunt and a smug smirk. He watched goosebumps erupt over her skin, pebbling her nipples.

Jedikiah's chuckle felt very different with her wrapped around him, the tiniest jostling sending sparks up their communal spine. "You gonna move today?" he asked, shifting infinitesimally and reinvigorating the sparks between them. "Or do you need to fill out a form?"

Stern's response was to lean over him and press her lips to his.

If their were sparks wrought from her movement, then the meeting of their mouths was dry Cali forests that were instantly set ablaze. Their minds instantly fell against each other in a complimentary fashion, like puzzle pieces. This. This was what had been missing, and they hadn't even _fathomed._

Jedikiah's mouth moved against Stern's like a measured dance performed to faster and faster music. Their lips slid and sucked and teased on pleasurable, shared autopilot, each enjoying the reaction of the other just before the roundabout sensation. Jedikiah's aching cock took a back burner, and Stern's own boiling heat seemed to be obscured by the sheer volume of emotion communicated.

Stern saw him, rough edges and spite and humanity. All that he was feeling then, everything he'd felt before, and all the informative contrast between regarding her.

Jedikiah witnessed Stern, in all her capacity. There were shadowed feelings he wasn't keen on prying sense out of. Once he got over the staggering size of her mind, he was inspired to a baffled laugh when their first lusts, their first wantings matched: the day she'd strode across his carpet and insinuated herself in his world.

"I'll be damned," she breathed to his lips. Somehow, even though their mouths had parted, the depth of the mental connection made it feel as though they hadn't.

He realized she was moving, languid little rocks of her pelvis that brought his throbbing need back to the forefront. His fingers curled against his cranium just to stay put. "Laura," he said her name like a mantra, like it was the one thing that would get him to paradise.

She reached down and soothed the scratches she'd left on his stomach with a whispered, _"Los siento, mi amor."_ Wires were crossing between their heads: his Spanish, her tongue.

 _"Estas bien,"_ he replied, because the language was common knowledge, now. He'd examine that later.

Stern's skin began to glisten as she sped up, impaling herself steadily and mind-rendingly over and over his hardness. Her breasts bounced alluringly, and her ass snugly bumped his thighs as she worked.

He's tacitly promised to give her this, this instance of full control over his aroused and vulnerable body. He wished he might grasp her hips, angle her specifically for pinpoint pleasure. No sooner had he thought it did she lean a certain way.

A yell punched out of her, sharply surprised. That same spot inside her that he'd tormented with his fingers was now being punished by the head of his cock.

Jedikiah bucked the inches he could, spurring Stern on mentally and physically. "Touch yourself," he ordered softly, picturing it.

Stern's hands drifted to her breasts, palming herself and thumbing her nipples. She shuddered, following his torturous blueprint, still controlled by his desire despite being on top.

Her clit was a bundle of fiber optic wires, begging for a touch. Jedikiah focused, directing his will, and without a single touch Stern's clit throbbed painfully hard, like a tazer to her pelvis. She keened and begged, "Jed, please, please - !"

"Please what?" he managed, suffering through the reverberations because he adored their affect on her. "Please, stop? Please, do it again? Please, Jed, fuck me until I can't see...?"

"Please, may I come?" she asked, slowing just enough to stave off the inevitable, opening her eyes to stare down into his, pleading.

"No." Jed's gaze unfocused as he mentally tazed her clit again, causing Stern to cry out and undulate. "Jed, please now, I need it!"

The Ultra man only had to hunt a second before he found what he was looking for, and mentally brought her face down to his as surely as if he'd pulled it by hand. There he made her hover, just over his lips, eyes pinned to his. With a flick of his mind, he reasserted that he was in control. He could very well keep her here, poised on the edge of release, indefinitely. He could make her sick with need.

She accepted it in moments, psychically bowing to his domination, submitting psionically in such a profound stand down that Jedikiah felt a heady bolt of lust spike his cock. "Come, Laura," he breathed permission.

Stern ground down for exactly five seconds, suspended over his face and oblivion, before falling off the end of the world in a glorious spiral of ecstatic bucking. Jedikiah jumped or was pulled, he wasn't sure, and his own world turned upside down as he climaxed, emptying his entire being through his cock. Stern's body echoed in his in a constant loop of pleasure, burst after sweet burst, rippling cunt and shooting cock, around and around.

It was enough to shred their conscious minds for the duration. One orgasm was strong enough, but the combined effects of two? Had the symptom persisted, a sanitarium would have been the only recourse. It went on forever, the kind of infinity that the human brain tries to grasp but can't, as a finite thing.

An eternity later, it began to lessen. And lessen. And finally, it was reduced to two bodies trembling against each other, naked, covered in cooling sweat.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hard edging, reaching a poignant conclusion.

Jedikiah woke up languidly to a still-warm empty spot in the sheets. Her scent was everywhere, and did nothing but encourage his morning hard-on.

The shower was running in the adjacent bathroom, and even as he got out of bed, the girly scent compounded with soap. Rose soap - Stern definitely had a favorite. Jedikiah followed his nose and the tendrils of steam ghosting across the cold tiles. The shower stall was an open, dedicated space with no curtain. As he was already naked, he intended to step into the shower with no preamble and conduct his morning worship at Stern's alter... but the first look at her stopped him.

Stern was at an angle that was mostly back, bent over to apply a loofah with fastidious intent to her ankle, moving up in a brusque manner to her knee, her thigh, and her hip. The no-nonsense way she treated her body when she thought she was alone made him feel both privileged to witness her unguarded and madly desirous to change it.

Goddamn, she even scrubbed her tits roughly. Did she have ANY fucking clue how precious that body was?

He was in the shower, crowding her under the spray, before he realized he was moving. A low growl erupted from his chest. She opened her mouth to speak her surprise and query, but he cut her short, swallowed her words, chased them back down her throat with his tongue. His hands were greedy, stealing the offensive tool of her uncaring, her scrubby, and chucking it against the far wall with a splat. Suds and rose filled his mouth as he pressed open-mouthed kisses down her body, hunger causing his teeth to make an appearance right behind them. Stern was moaning, and he knew without looking up she had flung back her head, because of the deluge of water flowing down her front.

He hit his knees before her, rock hard but completely uncaring, desperate to teach her the sanctity of her vessel, imbue her with the same reverence he possessed. His teeth raked her shallow navel, his hands spanned her ass and his elbows nudged her knees apart. He didn't know his own strength, in his haste: her toes nearly left the floor.

Jedikiah looked up long enough to make sure she corrected her balance, and was beyond gratified to see her wrapping shaking fingers around the edge of a tiny alcove that held unlit candles. He pressed his thumbs into her groin tendons and her feet left the ground completely, suspending her lithe body in the cradle of his palms.

Stern still (had started?) to smell of arousal and Jedikiah gloried in it, his cheek pressed to her inner, tremulous thigh. Water did nothing to dilute her essence, and the first few laps of his tongue were bursting with flavor that went straight to his cock. Her sharp cries and the way her clit pulsed in his lips made him grumble like a lion. The ass muscles in his hands tensed and her legs shook as she moved her hips, leveraging from her grip to ride his face. She trusted his strength to keep her, and that alone made him snarl with pleasure against her cunt.

Her voice echoed in the stall, rang like temple bells in his ears. Wordless begging, ecstatic moans, encouraging whines when he did something particularly well. The best moments were the ones she fell completely silent, or else pitched too high for her voice to allow, spine tensed off the wall and hips twitching shortly against his nose. In that moment, Jedikiah felt like a priest paying fervent tribute to his goddess, and his moans matched hers.

Wave after wave of her mind washed against his, until he could not tell the difference between them within and the water without. He could not recall consciously giving her access, but concluded she must have fallen into his mind with all the control of a bucket of water against gravity. Their pleasures mixed and remixed fluidly, and Jedikiah had to remind himself that he did not, in fact, have a needy pussy, despite what echoes he was feeling. But the clitoral stimulation he inflicted on her pulled double duty.

Stern was a mess under his mouth, and it showed in her voice. "Jedikiah, _please,"_ she begged, canting her pelvis as her body drew taut. Her breath was a collection of shudders.

 _Please what, Laura?_ he queried in their shared psyche, slowing his tongue to make her totter on the razor's edge. He did not spare his mouth to speak.

"Please, please, _please_ let me come!" she whimpered, tipping into his touch with every plea.

Jedikiah's cast his eyes up to her and observed Stern, wrecked: pupils blown, lips bitten pink and wide, neck peppered with signs of his affections, painted from collar to hairline in blush and from collar to belly in beard burn. **MINE!** roared the beast in him. His satisfied moan came from deep in his chest.

But he withheld. _No. Hold back._

Stern squealed with effort and frustration all at once as his mouth returned to her pussy. Her legs firmed around his shoulders like smooth vices, trembling. Her cries took a desperate, fighting edge, like a warrior digging deep.

Oh, how Jedikiah adored when she fought her own body for him. Nothing got him higher than listening to her need, her denial enacted. He could feel her flirting with the edge, clawing away from it even as she was dragged back again. He did not go easy on her: he slurped her tight hole, suckled on her lower lips, lapped her stiff clit cruelly.

She was reaching the end of her rope soon: body exhausted, mind stretched thin with pleasure. Any moment, his next tongue swipe could be what did her in.

 _Look down at me, Laura,_ he commanded in their shared thoughts. _Look into my eyes._

Stern heaved her head forward, utterly destroyed, willpower sapped. Her gaze snapped into place with his and suddenly, all was right in the world. Her entire being stood-down like a wave tossed in slow motion.

And he caught her.

 _Who does this -_ he ran his tongue from ass to clit, slow and firm - _belong to?_

"Y-you!" she gasped, jerking as she narrowly avoided coming against her will.

_Who does your pleasure belong to?_

"Yooouuu!" she whined, high and needy.

 _And who do your orgasms belong to?_ He asked as he latched onto her clit again.

"YOU!" she vociferated, hips stuttering hard.

Good _girl, Laura. Come at will._

It took all of five seconds of his renewed swirling of her clit to cause one hand to fall to his hair. Her legs pushed down and opened obscenely wide on a ragged, loud inhale. Suddenly, her posterior slipped free of Jedikiah's hands as those legs clamped shut on his head, muffling her scream. The hand in his hair tightened, causing him to grunt as the consequent sparks raced down his spine and detonated his own orgasm (as if hers hadn't already).

It hit first her, then him like a freight train. Jedikiah sucked her clit through it as she keened, and found his own release completely untouched and utterly destroying. It felt rather like being shot in the head, he imagined: at once being freed of all extraneous sensation but feeling an entire new cosmos of it open up.

After a few licks to her soft inner core, which was opened and pressed forward as she squirted with pleasure, he pulled her by the hips until her locked fingers left the alcove's edge. She slid down the wall and sat on his bent knees, chest to chest.

She was sobbing openly. "Goddammit, Jed!" she cried, tightening both hands in his hair. Tears poured down her face to mix with the shower's streams. "Stop, just stop, I can't take it - "

He pulled her tight against him, crooked his chin over her shoulder. His own eyes stung at the rawness she radiated, but Jedikiah did not let his own tears fall. She did enough for them both. Her bare breasts rubbed his chest as she cried.

"Please Jed, don't feel that," she rasped. "Stop feeling, _stop -_ "

"Can't," he said simply.

She'd felt the exact moment he fell in love with her. And it broke her. She'd worked so hard to keep her own love under wraps, only to have it explode out onto the field at the same time as his. "It's too much Jed," she wept.

"I know," he murmured, stroking her back and hair. "I know."

With her legs twitching from aftershocks and body shaking with sobs, he held her on the floor of her shower until she was cried out. He reached up and turned off the water, carefully gathered her in his arms, and rose. Setting her on the edge of the sink counter, he quickly wrapped a towel around his waist and another around her shoulders, rubbing briskly as Stern performed mental maintenance in their shared space. With the care of a bomb squad, she disentangled them from each other, receded from his shores having polished the stones gleaming and clean. An occasional hitch in her breathing made Jedikiah's own chest tighten.

"I'm sorry," he murmured into the top of her wet hair.

"Whatever for?" she husked.

"Didn't want to hurt you like that," he replied.

Stern finally looked him in the eyes. Her own looked tired, so tired. "I'm okay," she said. "It was intense, is all. All of it at once. Like my own feelings aren't enough to corral!"

"More intense than everything yesterday?" he queried with a hint of levity, leaving her side for a second towel meant for her legs.

"Yes," she sighed heavily. She shifted the towel around her shoulders to her hair, straightening her spine in such a way that, despite all, made Jedikiah's heart skip a beat. He busied his hands on her shapely calf, her strong thigh.

When she reemerged from under the towel, hair fluffed and crazed, Jedikiah lent her jaw a warm hand and covered her lips with his. Their foreheads balanced against each other upon withdrawal, but internally, they both seemed settled by the contact.

"It's... really fucking fast, ain't it?" she marveled, pointing her toes. She meant Them developing.

"If I wasn't watching it happen," Jed replied, thumbing her temples and stroking her hair. "I wouldn't trust it."

Nothing needed saying about their emotional conclusions. Their love was begun the moment she'd walked across his office for the first time. It was as deep as her mind and as strong and stony as his. There were no lies in their oneness, no room to hide. All was laid bare as a wind carved mountain, and just as intimidatingly beautiful.

Whatever it was, it was an alien tongue babbling away in their hearts. But they would learn fluency in it, and in each other. It was an unspoken promise.

Jedikiah wrapped her in the robe hanging behind her door and tied the belt with a deft hand and a heavy look she did not miss. Any excuse to put a knot on a woman brought his primal nature to the surface; he couldn't help it any more than she could help her responsive shiver. "Come on, Laura," he said, wrapping her legs around his waist and hefting her.

She gave a sorry excuse for a chuckle as she wrapped her arms around his neck. "You gonna carry me everywhere?" she asked, even as she rested her forehead against his neck.

"I know for a fact your legs haven't stopped twitching, dear," he replied, pinching her rear. She hissed as more of the twitches erupted, and Jedikiah had to laugh as he carried her into the kitchen. This time, he set her on the bar and turned to the fridge. The carton of orange juice joined her on the bar, then a jar of peanut butter and two spoons.

"You're going to crash soon," he stated. "You - we - need to eat."

Stern gave a put-upon sigh and dragged two mugs off the rack at her side.

Ever at ease in a towel, Jedikiah spoon fed her peanut butter from the jar and was delighted that she let him. In between nutty, soft kisses they drank the orange juice she poured. They continued to settle until he caught her stifling a yawn. "Naptime," he concluded.

"Thank God it's the weekend," she sighed as he carried her back to the bedroom.

"I just know your lack of fight is going to come back to haunt me," he chuckled, dumping her on the bed and enjoying her bounce.

"Maybe I like being cared for," she admitted, coming up on her elbows. "And if you try to repeat that, I'll deny it. You wear me the fuck out, Jed."

He let his pleasure at the compliment warm between them as he pulled on some underwear and peeled back the covers. "Get in," he said.

"Yes, sir," she purred, letting the robe fall as it would as she crawled into her place.

Jedikiah gave her ass an absent slap as she adjusted her lay. "Keep it up, missy," he said, trying to sound Dom, but only coming across as fond.

Stern shook a little in a bitten back laugh, but declined to egg him on as he spooned up behind her and pulled the covers over them. She sighed in contentment that they _both_ felt in their bones. Jedikiah pulled her slightly damp hair off her neck and pressed a kiss there, wrapping his arm under her breasts. "Sleep," he ordered.

He felt her yawn expand against his chest. "Halfway there," she murmured.

It took Jedikiah a moment to figure out what wasn't quite right. Stern beat him to the punch, though, and loosened the robe to coax his hand onto her breast. "Ridiculous man," she muttered, even though her nipple tightened in his palm.

Ah, that was it. "You would know," he agreed, already drifting off.

* * *

They slept until noon and woke up long enough to eat lunch, a la Stern. With the lack of animal products in the house due to her veganism, Stern was somewhat at a loss. But fortunately, vegan cheese substitute tasted a lot like the real thing, and macaroni covered a multitude of ills. In fact, Stern's psuedo-cheese sauce nearly brought the Ultra man to his knees for the second time in a morning.

"White pepper," Stern surmised at his happy groan. "Makes the world go 'round."

She found him a spare toothbrush, washed his clothes, and gave zero indication of wanting him to fuck off, so Jedikiah stayed.

Stern didn't really seem inclined to change her Sunday routine unless he made a suggestion, and that was fine by him. He settled her against his chest on the couch to watch his usual sports center breakdown, and she pulled actual fucking _knitting_ out of a basket to entertain herself.

During a beer commercial, he asked, "What're you making, anyway?" He'd been periodically trying to puzzle it out over her shoulder, but even with his IQ it was a mystery.

"Helen in Requisition is pregnant," Stern replied. "I'm making her a nice gender-neutral blanket."

"Shouldn't a blanket be square?" he asked. At the moment the fabric looked like interlocking right-angles.

"It's entrelac," she replied. "It'll turn out square." She rotated the fabric to show that she was working from point to point, diagonally.

"Sounds like a lot of trouble for a blanket."

"Some things are worth the trouble," she said, looking up to wink at him.

Although silence fell comfortably, he knew she could feel the question brewing in his mind. It was a simple matter, as unobtrusive as her own thoughts, to pose the query. _Would you ever have children?_

The howling void of pain and longing in response felt as hopeless as the center of a whirlpool. Faceless, dream-like images danced across his mind's eye of little girls in dresses, permeated by a happiness and warmth from a hereto undiscovered place in Jed's heart that he recognized as a seed-start from hers.

They were accompanied by an abrupt shutdown. _Not with the company I keep_ , Stern said quietly. _He'd threaten them. Even as they grew in my belly they'd not be safe. And when they were born he'd spirit them away to a dissection board. I'd never see them again._

He, meaning the Director.

An anguish was mirrored between them, but Stern swept it away with the practiced ease of a pipe dream being recognized. "Sometimes I wonder," she murmured, a hand drifting to her unstretched tummy. "Would I be able to sense them? Even communicate with them?"

Jedikiah's chest ached a little. He covered her hand with his, braced it with the other. He made no promises. He garnered no alternatives. And he dared not entertain his scientific side while she was present. But he certainly filed it all away for later.

"Ah, well," she sighed wistfully, as though it wasn't an impossible desire viciously torn to shreds. "Thus, the NuvaRing. Beer?" she asked, rising from the couch.

Jedikiah's front cooled rapidly in her absence. "Sure."


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which we get a wee bit meta, and blow some kinks and facts out of proportion... all for the love of fiction.   
> Erotic hypnosis is very real, kiddos, as is age regression hypno. 
> 
> I really appreciate how much of a dirty old man Jed is, forming her into a virgin bride for his own amusement. Just assume there's a whole fuckton of consent talks beforehand.  
> ***************************************************************************

"You _must_ be high," Stern laughed at him, holding her sides and rolling on the bed with mirth.

Jedikiah snorted at her reaction, propped on his elbow beside her. "Hypnotism is a scientifically studied phenomenon, Laura. And erotic hypnotism is not only a skill I've honed, but a verified kink subculture."

She dissolved into giggles and rolled to face him, eyes dancing. "Sorry, for some reason I'm envisioning a stopwatch on the end of your cock, swaying..."

Jedikiah couldn't stop himself from indignant scoffs, then disbelieving chuckles, while she continued her cackling.

Once they'd calmed down enough to continue, Stern adopted a querying expression. "What might the ramifications be for someone of my mental aptitude?"

Jedikiah smirked. "I was so hoping you'd ask. I'm not sure exactly, but I imagine that the effects of hypnosis would either not work at all, or work extremely well."

"What decides that?"

"How well you trust me. How easily and completely you submit to me."

Stern wriggled a little closer, her breath fanning his face. "Of course I trust you," she replied softly, stroking his cheek. "And I'm pretty good at letting my guard down, am I not?"

He smiled in confirmation, capturing her hand to kiss the knuckles. "Wanna give it a try?"

Her gaze flickered over his face for a searching moment, followed by a nod.

"Then open up," he encouraged softly, tapping her forehead. "And let me in."

The opening of Stern's mind was like opening a sealed mental vacuum. With Jedikiah pushing, and her pulling, they managed to conduct his psyche into hers with little effort.

Once again, he was adrift in a vast, calm ocean. With a breath both metaphorical and physical, he ducked below the surface and let the weight of his mind slowly sink him in hers.

It was mildly alarming, to leave his body completely behind and be left with no honed defenses, in proverbial enemy territory. Just as he thought so, though, the selkie appeared to swirl around him and smooth his skin with her own.

"Hello, lovely," he crooned. "Take me deeper?"

 _Happily, love._ The selkie slowed enough to grant him a hold on its rubbery skin, pointed its nose to the ocean floor, and took off. Jedikiah could feel the press of Stern all around him, not dissimilar to water pressure on divers. It gradually got stronger, and stronger, constricting Jedikiah's puny mind with the enormity of hers. Just when he thought he'd have to stop, the squeeze suddenly lessened.

Stern let go of herself with a sigh more felt than heard, consciously allowing him access. Jedikiah let go of the selkie, though it stayed within reach, ready to rescue him.

"You trust me?" he asked it, staring into her big, intelligent eyes.

Stern bobbed nonverbally.

"I have an idea that I think will be pretty fun," he continued. "But to pull it off, you'll have to go away for a bit. Do you think you can stay here?"

The selkie bobbed again. _What's the idea?_

"Where's the fun in me telling you?" he teased, tracing connect-a-freckle over her slick skin.

The selkie emitted a stream of bubbles, as much for his tickling as to stick out her tongue.

"Atta girl," he cooed. Turning back the way he came, Jedikiah began to swim. As he slowly rose, he began the actual hypnotism induction. Layer upon layer of mental relaxation he inflicted, then carefully laid the work for what he wanted. He felt certain aspects of Stern rise in currents that tugged him, but he carefully talked them down and sent them to the selkie. Some of them he kept, though, and redirected. As he put the final strokes on his masterpiece, he noted the ocean felt completely calm, reverent even.

Utterly malleable.

He made her forget the words he'd used, and forget the ways he'd done this, and carefully broke the surface on the ocean.

The slide back into his own body was a shock, like waking from a half-sleep. Jedikiah opened his eyes a moment before she opened hers.

He could tell he'd done an excellent job by the serene, innocent look she gave him.

"Hi, daddy," she murmured in a slightly higher than normal voice.

Jedikiah grinned at the pet name, because he'd left suggestions in place for her to use it. "Hi, babygirl."

The ever-so-slight pulse of her sex at his addressing wasn't lost in the loosely held connection. She'd reacted just the way he'd programmed her to. She stretched cutely, as though to hide her faint blush, swaddled in sheets. "I must've fallen asleep."

"Weddings are tiring," he agreed, playing into the fantasy he'd laid.

"What did you do while I slept?" she asked, the sheets falling askew to glimpse her white lace bra.

He couldn't resist the scrap of skin and lace, stroking it with gentle fingertips. "Watched you," he informed her. "Thought about what I'd do to you when you woke up."

Stern's blush roared from pink to red, and she pulled the covers back up to hide her sweet skin and averted her eyes.

"Uh-uh," he said, taking her chin in hand. "No hiding from me. What's wrong?"

She floundered for words, her lip under worrisome teeth until he freed it with a thumb. "I'm... _nervous._ "

Jedikiah could feel his blood heating deliciously. "About what, babygirl?"

The pulse came again, causing the barest hitch in her breath. "I've n-never had s-... never had-..."

"Never had _sex,_ babygirl?" he finished for her, emphasizing for effect.

She hid her face in his chest with a squeaked, "Yes."

Jedikiah's blood was simmering now, and the red-tinged ears at his chest could never have missed the growl that grew in it. "And you've never cum before, have you, babygirl?"

She delicately shuddered against him. "Yes, daddy."

"You gonna let me change that, hmm, babygirl?"

"But daddy," she whined softly, finally raising her face. "I don't know _how_ to c-cum."

Jedikiah laughed, and pulled his innocent bride in for a searing kiss. His entire hypnosis had taken, and on the first try, too! "You don't have to know, in order to do it, babygirl," he murmured against her lips, enjoying the shudder produced. "I'll teach you how. And what's more, I'll make you do it without you even trying."

"What if I can't?" she whispered, eyes glistening suddenly. "What if I fail, or if I'm bad at it, or if - ?"

He silenced her with another, deeper kiss; his tongue sliding greedily into her mouth to stroke hers. "Don't think like that," he told her gently. "Just let daddy take care of you, okay, babygirl?"

Stern's wet lips parted slightly at her pet name, and she nodded dazedly.

Jedikiah rolled her onto her back, distracting her with more kisses while he pulled the sheets down surreptitiously. Her gleaming skin drew his questing fingertips into long, soft strokes. He eagerly took in her silky smoothness, soon following with his lips all around her bra, over the sweet mounds of her breasts.

He knew how to get what he wanted without asking. "Mmm, babygirl," he moaned into her breast.

She arched gorgeously under him, giving him access to her bra clasp.

As the lingerie loosened, she broke from the trance of his kisses to cover herself as he freed her lovely tits. "Oh, daddy," she squirmed, embarrassed. "Don't look..."

"Why not?" he asked, kissing all around her cupped hands. "You're beautiful, babygirl."

Stern shivered and her hands tentatively fell away, only to be replaced by his. She fit in his palms perfectly, spilling between them if he squeezed lightly, and her nipples were quickly coaxed to hardness by his mouth and light, teasing fingers.

She gasped for breath at each new sensation, arching when he did something she especially liked.

Jedikiah's hand carefully cupped between her legs, only to have them snap closed on him.

"What are you doing?!" she asked, a sudden panicky look on her face.

"Shh, shh," he soothed. With a little worming of his fingers, he found what he sought. "I'm feeling you for wetness," he told her, mouthing her nipple. "To see how good I'm doing." He extracted his hand and held it up for inspection. It was glistening with her juices. "I'd say I'm not doing bad, hmm, babygirl? Do you feel good?"

Stern wriggled, drawn between embarrassment and arousal once again. Biting her lip, she nodded, and her hands fell to her own breasts in a self-soothing manner. Fuck, the virginal look was almost too much to bear, especially when she touched herself like that. Jedikiah's cock twitched, aching to sink into her wetness and drive her wild.

But it would be more fun to stick to the plan.

"But I can do much, much better, you know," he said. "If you let me take those off." He indicated her panties.

Stern's eyes got big and she lightly squeezed her own breasts thoughtfully.

"Trust me, babygirl," he said, touching her waist tenderly.

She swallowed hard, shut her eyes tightly, and whispered, "Okay, daddy."

Smiling in victory, he slid the lacy white panties down her legs, secretly grinning at how she kept her knees together, except to let the panties pass.

With a eyes closed, brow furrowed, lower lip in her teeth, and blush high, she parted the knees captured by his palms.

Her pussy glistened, familiar and delightful to his eyes. "Someone's mighty excited, for being so _nervous_."

Stern muttered under her breath and blushed harder. Jedikiah had to chuckle throatily. "Mmmm, you know my favorite place on a woman? This, right here." He ran both hands down the inner portions of her legs. "Soft and smooth... easily marked by my teeth... for some women, their thighs don't touch at all. Others, they rub all the way to their knees, all plump and edible. But you... oh, babygirl, yours touch and part in the perfect ratio."

"You -" she squeaked, cleared her throat. "You make me so damn anxious when you say things like that, daddy."

Jedikiah laughed, shifting. "Babygirl needs to learn to take a compliment. Because I'm going to lavish you with them. Often. Thoroughly. The same way I will pleasure your body."

She moaned softly in discomfort as he slid eye-level with her pussy, clearly still fighting embarrassment.

"I am going to suckle (kiss) and lick (kiss) and _bite_ (nip) that luscious little thigh gap," he murmured into her skin. "Until your nerves give way to dire need. And then, you know what, babygirl? I'm going to do it even longer, because you made me wait to get my favorite treat."

She keened quietly as he set to work, making good on every verb he promised. Trembling at every touch, she moaned. Her slickness ran in beads between her ass cheeks, over the cute little rosette that he had oh, so many plans for.

He couldn't resist a teasing taste of her dripping cunt, a too-soft lap that made her choke and arch towards him. He chuckled. "Coming around to the idea, hmm?"

Stern frowned down between her legs at him, then glanced aside. "Maybe..."

He blew cool air over her wet lower lips. "Enough to want more?"

She shuddered and bit her lip, eyes suddenly misty and confused. "I want... I _want..._ daddy? What do I want?"

This shit was the biggest power trip of Jedikiah's fucking life. His skin crawled with goosebumps at the sheer thrill. "You want to cum, babygirl," he replied.

A single tear slithered towards her throat. "It's so intense daddy, and you've not even gotten to my pussy."

He slid up her body to plant a true kiss to her tremulous mouth, promise and comfort in it. "I know it's a lot to feel, babygirl. I've got you."

Big, glistening eyes stared up into his. "I'm scared, daddy."

He shifted to stroke the hair behind her ear. "Of what, babygirl?"

"That it's going to ruin me. That I won't be able to stand it."

Jedikiah considered thoughtfully for a moment. "What if," he began, kissing the tip of her nose. "I promise..." he kissed her mouth again. "To go extra..." he kissed the middle of her chest. "Super..." he kissed her fluttering belly. "Slow?" He kissed her smooth mound. "Hmm? How's that sound, babygirl?"

She blinked those big eyes down at him. "Do you promise daddy?"

Jedikiah smiled, letting wickedness color it. "You say you want it slow right now babygirl. But you'll find out soon, I can be quite cruel when I'm slow." He licked up one side of her pussy. "Especially," he continued, licking the other side. "When you find out you want more, faster. When your desperation crests and you want daddy to make you cum. You know what I'll say to you then, babygirl?"

As she shook her head, he pulled her clit into his mouth for the barest, lightest suckle that made her moan beautifully. "I'm going to tell you _no._ I'm going to make you _beg._ Until I am damn sure you deserve to cum, I'm going to play with my favorite toy: this sweet..." He suckled again. "Soaking..." _Suckle._ "Virgin pussy."

And with that, he descended upon her cunt.

Her entire body arched at the sensation the first real, hard draw from his lips on her clit. "Oh! Oh, daddy!"

He chuckled into his mouthful and did it again. And again. And again. Letting each wave of pleasure crest with impossible sluggishness, fade, and make her desire more.

The texture of her moans changed with time, growing more breathy and with the pitch of impatience increasing. "S-something's coming daddy!" she cried, starting to tighten on his head.

"It's not going to be you, babygirl," Jedikiah smirked, popping off her pussy. "Feel how wet you're making my face." He smeared his cheeks all over her inner thighs. "All that girly goo is going to be useful later, you know. When I make you cum on daddy's cock."

She whined, tightening her thighs. "But I want to cum _now,_ daddy."

He smiled. "Eventually, you will. You can do it more than once, you know."

Her eyes widened. "I can?"

"Oh yes, babygirl. Now come here," he growled, dragging her closer by her shaking thighs. "Daddy wants his cream."

She wailed as his set his mouth on her twitching pussy without remorse, licking and sucking her swollen lips and lapping aggressively at her sopping wet slit. Her inner walls fluttered compulsively around his tongue when he plunged it as deep as he could.

He brought her to the edge and stopped, popping off her skin and licking his own lips with pleasure as she whined and writhed. "Oh, does babygirl like having her sweet little virgin cunt eaten? Hmm?"

Stern shuddered and wriggled in his hands. "Please, daddy - "

"Please, what?"

Stern gnawed her lower lip, looking at him from under those thick lashes. "I don't want you to stop, daddy, please?"

Jedikiah grinned like the devil. "If I edge you, babygirl, it's because I enjoy your desperation. But who knows?" He amended, lowering his face again. "If you beg enough, I might have mercy."

She tightened like a spring trap around his head, shaking and moaning brokenly with each lash of his tongue. "Please daddy, please please pleasepleaseplease - !"

"Uh-uh," chuckled Jedikiah, tonguing circles around her stiff clit.

She shuddered in a fit of nonverbality for a few minutes, abiding by his indirect stimulation. A sudden, impossibly cute growl of frustration escaped her.

"What's that?" Jedikiah asked, plunking his chin on her stomach. "You'll have to spell out _exactly_ what you want, babygirl."

Stern huffed and avoided his gaze in favor of the ceiling. "Please daddy, can you touch my clitty directly? Pretty please?"

Jedikiah's cock twitched at the surge of blood to it. Without a word, he descended on her pussy again, latched on firmly to her clit, and sucked slow and hard while his tongue began to lash it softly.

Stern's noises sounded like she was incapable of making words. Her hands slid gently into his short hair, stroking through it in reward and encouragement she couldn't voice. It was Jedikiah's turn to moan now, at the pleasant tugging of his strands.

"I want to finger you babygirl," he broke off long enough to murmur. "Say yes."

 _"Yes,"_ she gasped.

He worked his arm up between them and traced her pulsing pussy with a fingertip, gauging how well he'd opened her up. She practically swallowed the fingertip as her muscles pushed towards him, and he answered the call by plunging the first digit of his finger inside.

Hot. Slick. Smooth. She tantalized him beyond belief.

"You like that, babygirl? Hmm?" he rasped, drawing back to look upon the creature impaled on his fingertip. She'd gone very still except for the part of her wrapped around him.

"I..." Stern's voice creaked. She swallowed and tried again. "It's not _bad,_ daddy. But it's different. I can't really tell though. Can I have mo- _ooore..."_ She threw back her head and drew out the word as he granted her request, sliding the entirety of his finger into her clutching heat.

"Oh, _fuck_ Stern," Jedikiah moaned. "I am going to take you _apart._ "

"D-daddy," she whimpered, clamping down on him. "Daddy, I think I want to try moving it, pretty please?"

Jedikiah grinned. "Like this?" he asked, pressing down, towards her ass.

Stern writhed at the sudden feeling of being full. "Nooo daddyyyy..."

"Hmm. Like this?" He gently fucked her with that finger, keeping the pressure downward.

Stern shook her head on the pillow, frowning. "No, that's not it daddy, _please._ I don't know! You _must_ know what I want, don't you?"

Jedikiah looped his free arm over her belly and turned his fingering hand palm up. "Oh, I've got a notion, babygirl."

He tapped her g-spot five times in rapid succession, faster than she could react, then partially withdrew before she tightened down and _howled._ "YES DADDY YES LIKE THAT PLEASE!"

Jedikiah did it again in the midst of her squirming, and her back arched as sharply as her pitch. "Ohhhh my God what are you doing to me daddy?!"

Jedikiah had to force himself to stop smiling like a fool as he lowered his mouth back down to her pussy. "Ready to try both, babygirl?"

Her fingers tightened in his hair and she opened her legs as widely as possible, primed to take everything he gave her. Shaking with the strain of keeping her legs so wide, she whimpered out desperately. "Daddy, oh please, daddy, I'll do anything, please please please - "

Just as he put her clit in his mouth, he withdrew his finger.

"Noooo!" Stern cried, wriggling and cheated. "No no no I'm so close!"

"And here I thought you didn't believe you could do it," Jedikiah chuckled against her wet core.

Stern keened and flexed herself wide again, hoping to entice him. "I know I can do it!"

"This is your punishment," he murmured. "For making me wait for my favorite treat."

"God, shit, _fuck d-daddy p-please!_ " she stuttered out, rocking sporadically as she tried to get the last necessary stimulation.

"Tell me babygirl, is it too much now?"

"Nooo daddy it's not enoouugghh!"

He slid his fingertip in again, rested it teasingly on her g-spot while she fluttered and drew up around him in anticipation. "Still think daddy can't make you cum, in any way he wants?"

"N-no daddy! You know-... you can do anything-... _you're master of my body daddy!_ "

Jedikiah smirked. "And thus we reach the point of our lesson."

He started to circle her g-spot then with his finger, and her clit with his tongue, with great care. Stern babbled nonsensically as her orgasm grew and grew within her. She seemed confused by the slowness of his pace, which showed in her breathing and furrowed brow. But Jedikiah knew what he was doing, and he dared her to question that fact.

"Oh..." Stern moaned finally. "Oh God..." She could feel it coming, could feel what he was about to do to her.

"Mmhmm," Jedikiah agreed into her clit.

"Is-is this it daddy? May I please cum for you now?" She trembled and held onto the edge of her orgasm, trepiditiously teetering over the fall.

Jedikiah gave just enough of a nod to indicate.

When Stern fell, it was not a free fall from space: it was a lurch and gliding drop of a roller coaster. With his clever finger and even more clever tongue, Jedikiah dialed Stern in in mid-flight, separating each pulse of her orgasm and magnifying its intensity through sheer prolonging. He never changed pace, forcing her climax to draw out impossibly, and exponentially increase in depth.

By his speed, it was nearly a ruination. But oh, that cleanly sliced frame-by-frame orgasm was far stronger than any ruined orgasm.

Stern could not make a noise. Her breath stopped dead. Her body held its arched position. She came and came and came for what felt like _forever._

Jedikiah removed his mouth and Stern collapsed in a heaving pile of bonelessness. "Aw hell," he said casually. "One more, I think." Before she even had time to draw a second breath, he sucked _hard_ on her clit and rubbed her g-spot firmly, and she came again.

"Gawwwwwwdddd Jeeeedddd!" The force of this orgasm made her curl into herself.

"And one more," he half-laughed, repeating the motion.

"JESUS!"

"Hmm. I think I want another for dessert." He rubbed fast and hard on her insides, and Stern garnered enough air to scream. She sprayed his hand, his face, the bed: she soaked everything in the way and saturated his hand in creamy cum.

Laughing, Jedikiah withdrew his digits and kissed his way up her stomach, pecking her gormless face on the nose, and then the lips. Her eyes were hazy and her jaw was loose.

"Guh," she grunted, slack but twitching.

"I know babygirl," he replied, wrapping her up in his arms.

 _"Guh,"_ she repeated.

"Rest up, you're going to need it," he advised.

"Guh..." she sighed, instantly falling asleep as the hormone dump swept over her like a tide.


End file.
